Often called the world’s happiest country, Finland is best known to many as a nation with a deep-rooted sauna culture, and home to the magical Northern Lights. For centuries, people who have resided on this slice of earth have passed the time via walking in its beautiful forests, foraging, ice swimming, skiing, fishing, knitting, tossing logs, and even enjoying the most unusual of pastimes, competitive wife-carrying.
However, in recent decades, like much of the world, entertainment in Finland has too moved into the digital realm. Many may not know, but this Northern European nation is renowned for its technological prowess and high digital adoption. According to a 2025 report, 5.52 million individuals living in the nation have Internet access, which comes to 98.2% of the population. It too has 4.39 million social media users, which is a staggering 78% of residents.
Finland is also one of the best-covered 5G regions of the world, offering, by many accounts, the fastest median internet speeds on the Old Continent. It has too gone both feet in adopting digital wallets, and per Statista, as of May 2024, 95% of Finns, ages between twelve and sixty-five, use streaming services for music, which represents a 4% increase from 2022. Therefore, these figures should be evidence enough of just how digital Finland has gone, and below, we dive into how modern-day innovations have evolved how people in The Land of a Thousand Lakes pass their leisure time.
A Tradition of Gaming
Something many do not know about Finland is that it has a developed video game industry whose roots go back to 1979 and Chesmac, a chess title, with much of this sphere here getting based in the Helsinki Metropolitan area. Nowadays, it marks an annual turnover of €2.85 billion and profits of €800 million. Per the latest count, it has around two hundred and seventy active studios, with forty of these getting established post-2023. There are more than four thousand people employed by this sector, with the majority of these working in mobile and PC gaming development.
Much of the growth of the video gaming arena in Finland is a result of strategic government investments, many of which came in the 2010s, once politicians saw the potential of this sector, following the success of Finnish-made mobile games such as Angry Birds and Clash of Clans. Naturally, these are pieces of mobile software, something that Finland is renowned for, as it is the birthplace of one of the most-played mobile games of all time, Snake for the Nokia 3310.
However, it is worth noting that Finland is too the place where the Max Payne franchise got birthed, and it was the base of the social networking service Habbo, which, as Max Payne, was all the rage for a short period of the early 2000s.
What is interesting about the country is that it does not have any casino studios, which is likely due to the country implementing a strict monopoly system on online gambling, which should be broken up by a new licensing system that should come into play at the beginning of 2027. When that occurs, one can expect to see the number of Finns who play video games go up from the already impressive 2.8 million, per data from Newzoo.
Video games are now a staple pastime for much of the Western world, as they not only deliver intrinsic psychological rewards but feed human needs for competence, autonomy, relatedness, and purpose.
Video Streaming in Finland
Though most people associate the birth of TV shows and movie streaming with Netflix, the truth is that the concept of streaming services can get traced back to the late 1990s. Technically, RealPlayer, the creation of Progressive Networks, was the first popular streaming player. Nonetheless, it was not very successful, as it was unsuitable for mass adoption due to the low resolution offered and heavy buffering. Still, it set some groundwork, and after it, followed services like AtomFilms and iFilm. Then, in 2007, Netflix made its move from DVDs to video-on-demand, and around the same time, BBC’s iPlayer popularized the concept of catch-up TV.
Still, the modern era of VOD happened in the early 2010s, and in 2025, over 60% of households in Finland are paying for at least one streaming service, as the country’s statisticians note there are over three million active streaming subscriptions in the country at the time of writing. What is interesting about this seemingly high percentage is that it is lower than the one other Nordic nations boast, where at least 70% of households are paying for streaming services.
Unsurprisingly, Netflix is king in Finland, as it is in more than eighty thousand households, but its market share has gotten cut down in recent times, as Amazon Prime and Disney+ have gotten some ground on it. Mediavision senior analyst Fredrik Liljeqvist notes that the Finnish video and TV market is more and more going towards streaming, driven by global trends and foreign streaming companies entering the country. Moreover, social media platforms are too playing a growing role in the expansion of this entertainment avenue.
The reasons for Finns gravitating towards streaming are simple: most services have low prices for basic models, they offer unmatched convenience, a vast number of options, no ads, and serialized shows have become essential conversation at work and in various social situations.
Music Streaming – Free Model Over Paid
Music streaming is another pillar of Finnish digital entertainment. Going by a Polaris Nordic Digital Music Survey, 95% of the Nordic population uses streaming services for music. In 2018, this number was only five percentage points less for people between twelve and sixty-five, which shows that Nordic nations have been heavily into listening to music through such platforms for a long time.
One thing that must get highlighted regarding Finns is that a large share of music streaming happens on free or ad-supported platforms. 78% of Finns use YouTube for listening to music, while 60% enjoy chilling with tunes through Spotify, per a 2022 four-thousand respondent survey.
Finns are listening to music a lot; the challenge the country’s music industry has is to make its residents transition to its paid tiers.
