Hot under pressure: How SVT broadcast a live show from one of the world’s biggest saunas

By Simon Staffans, Project Manager, SVT

The challenge

Last year at Swedish Television (SVT) we were tasked with a specific request: to create a one-hour programme that would act as an outreach engine, offering a natural, logical and attractive way for audiences to interact with the content and be exposed to another series, already in production.  The programme series – produced for SVT Minorities,  the department producing programs in the official minority languages of Sweden – was called Bastudrömmar, (Sauna Dreams) and followed a number of ambitious sauna builds all around Sweden. The series did not, however, feature any ways to interact with audiences in a deeper way, which this live show ultimately would do.”

Read more: SVT is nothing if we are not seen (Insight)

Our playing field was wide open – as long as we had an actionable and logical idea we’d most likely get to produce it. Reaching out to a number of groups on social media proved very fruitful. Sauna – although originally a Finnish past time – is extremely popular all over the world and nowhere more than in Sweden. Communities are abundant and very active.

The opportunity

In early summer we decided to tag on to a community event, to be held in November. The event would see members of the 36,000  strong Facebook group “Bastufolket” (i.e. “People of the Sauna”) all go in their saunas at 4pm on November 9th. This was naturally a golden opportunity for us, especially seeing as the “Bastudrömmar” series would premiere the previous week.

Scouting the breadth and length of Sweden turned up a number of possible locations. In the end we settled on one of the largest saunas in Sweden, a part of the Cape East spa complex in Haparanda in the north. The location had been used as filming location for the Swedish and Finnish “Survivor” series during the Covid lockdown and they were very accommodating and understanding of our needs.

The experiment

As pre-production advanced over the course of the autumn, we were also handed the opportunity to be a part of a trial of a new, innovative solution. As the live broadcast was produced for SVT minorities, a large part of the programme would be in Finnish, one of the official minority languages of Sweden. We obviously wanted to still make the content as available as possible for the language majority and had been looking at different possibilities to live-translate.

The live show

We had, of course, done some marketing for our show, especially in social media groups centred around sauna bathing. As we neared the start of the show, we opened up the SVT Duo app to allow the audience to send in their own sauna images and chat with the people in the broadcast. We quickly started receiving material, wonderful images of people’s own saunas as they were preparing to join the nation-wide event.

The show Hela Sverige Bastar (All of Sweden go sauna bathing) started as planned at 4pm and the images continued steadily arriving, with us publishing them with small intervals throughout the show. We featured one show host and two co-hosts (the hosts of the “Bastudrömmar” series mentioned above). We had guests in and had video calls to three members of the audience, connecting to them either in their saunas as they were bathing or as they were outside, getting prepared to go bathing. We had also prepared some pre-recorded inserts, such as talks with researchers about sauna as a brand and visiting a Sauna Society in Stockholm.

The live translation and subtitling worked well, until it didn’t. The solution could not keep up a full 100 percent as the languages people spoke in the broadcast switched between different languages depending on the situation; some were more comfortable speaking Swedish, some spoke an archaic version of Finnish – a separate minority language in its own right called Meänkieli. Luckily, we had a person devoted to switching on and off the audience-facing part of the solution, so when it sometimes went off the rails we quickly removed it from the stream and waited until it had stabilised again before re-introducing the AI-subtitles.

The result

While the live broadcast didn’t reach any amazing amounts of audience numbers, everyone we talked to from the core audiences were very pleased with the project and the increased exposure sauna bathing received.

As the aim of the live show was to boost the series “Bastudrömmar” we eagerly tracked the audience numbers for the show of the following week and were very excited to see a remarkable uptick of viewers. Admittedly this could have been due to other factors as well, unknown to us, but I believe we had at least a small impact on this increase.

The conclusions

• It pays off to use content to enhance the pull of other pieces of content, especially when the content is so intimately connected to a thriving community of possible viewers.
• It pays off to have a continuous organic and non-selling communication going on with these communities – these are channels that are then ready to be utilised for future communications.
• It pays off to safeguard for all possible calamities,  whether that’s 400 litres of water drenching your audio equipment or an AI-powered translation service displaying some hiccups.
• It pays off to make the extra effort and take the extra steps, to become a natural part of a community of your core audience.