For the past six years, millions of people have been tuned to a 24-hour live stream of moose travelling in northern Sweden every spring.
“The Great Moose Movement” swims the Angerman River to track animals and take an annual journey into green summer meadows.
This year’s 24-hour program for SVT Play, the Swedish national broadcaster’s streaming platform, began on Tuesday. This started a week before schedule due to the warm weather this April.
Broadcasting has become a “slow television” phenomenon, and since its founding in 2019, it has grown a loyal fanbase.
Cait Borjesson, 60, who has been obsessed with the annual live stream since she stumbled during the Covid-19 pandemic, said her television has been on 16 hours in a row since it began on Tuesday.
“It’s incredibly relaxing,” she said. “There’s the natural sounds of birds, the wind, the trees. It gives you the feeling that you’re in nature, even if you’re not.”
For Cait, seeing migration has become an annual tradition. So she takes a break from work to get fully immersed in the three-week broadcast.
She said the stream was “like a treatment” and helped with anxiety and panic attacks.
And she’s not alone. SVT’s LiveStream has a wide audience, including a Facebook group with over 77,000 members who have come together to share memorable moments, emotional responses to the broadcast, and the shared charm of the transition.
Most of their journey, which SVT has acquired, passes through the village of Kullberg in northern Sweden, next to Angerman.
Golan Erickson, dean of the Faculty of Forest Sciences, University of Agricultural Science and Broadcast Science Advisor, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, said the moose dates back to the summer range after consolidating in places where temperatures have improved in winter.
“Historically, this migration has continued since the ice age,” he said. “In spring and summer, moose spreads more evenly within the landscape.”
He added that around 95% of moose in northern Sweden migrate each year, adding that early migration is not new as this year was spurred by snow on the ground.
“Early springs sometimes happen,” he said. “We’re still within the normal range of variations.”
Over 30 cameras are used to capture moose as they travel through vast landscapes, he added.
The show attracted around 1 million people during its 2019 release and gained 9 million viewers in 2024.
Min Xuan Tulong, a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences who surveyed the audiences of the livestream, said in a fast-paced media environment, people enjoy experiencing nature through this “slow television” style.
“A lot of people say it’s like an open window into the forest,” he says. “When I ask them if they like music in the background or commentary, they say they prefer to have the sounds of wind, birds and trees.”
Swedish forest areas have around 300,000 moose. This animal is known in the Scandinavian country as the “King of the Forest.”
