Voddler, the Netflix / Hulu / Spotify-for-movies of Scandinavia, whichever comparison you fancy, has raised $8 million in funding in a round led by Nokia’s venture capital arm Nokia Growth Partners.
The video-on-demand company’s previous backers (undisclosed private individual investors) also participated.
In 2010, Voddler says it served 5 million movies from a catalog of some 3,500 titles (it has been securing distribution agreements with studios since 2009).
Not too shabby for its first full year in operations.
Content comes from both international and domestic media companies, and videos are made available to over 850,000 customers throughout Scandinavia. More than 80% of the content on Voddler is said to be made available free of charge, though it comes with ads.
Voddler is now focusing its development efforts on making its content available on handheld devices like smartphones and tablets, as well as on Internet-connected TVs and set-top boxes. Hence the partnership with Nokia.
Founded in 2005, Voddler is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, and builds its service on patented peer-to-peer technology for managed distributed streaming. The service is currently available in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark.