Marathon live TV voyage launched in Norway

After months of planning and technical preparation, Norwegian state broadcaster NRK went live on Thursday night with its marathon coverage of a Hurtigruten voyage from Bergen north to the line’s turnaround point in Kirkenes. Viewers will be able to follow every minute of the trip on NRK’s channel 2, until it ends on Wednesday morning.



All told, the broadcast will amount to more than 8,000 minutes, or 134 hours of continuous coverage as NRK cameras mounted all around the Hurtigruten ship MS Nord-Norge chart the five-day voyage. The marathon broadcast, announced last spring, is rooted in the surprising success of another NRK project that mounted cameras on board the train line between Bergen and Oslo in 2009.

That show, lasting a relatively paltry seven hours, attracted more than a million Norwegians (roughly a fifth of the country’s entire population) and made NRK realize that the concept could be popular indeed. Now NRK hopes millions of others will also enjoy the feeling of being on board a Hurtigruten ship, even if it likely is humanly impossible to watch the entire broadcast from start to finish.



The production is costing around NOK 3 million ($545,000) with the state broadcaster picking up the entire tab, but NRK officials think it’s worth it, as a sheer TV viewing experience. NRK has also sold portions of the program to Swedish state broadcaster SVT, Danish radio and broadcasters in Finland and the Færøe Islands.

You can watch live coverage here.