Data Protection and Viaplay

We value your trust in us.

1. Introduction

Your right to privacy is at the forefront of everything we do. Our aim is to provide you with the best streaming service with content tailored and personalized just for you. For that, we need to process your personal data, and this Privacy Statement (this or the “Statement”) will explain to you in a transparent manner how that is done, from the collection, storage, usage and sharing of your personal data.

This Statement applies to you when creating and using your account with Viaplay, browsing our websites and applications, participating in surveys, contests, user groups, subscribing to our newsletter or otherwise when you are communicating with us through social media or by using any of our other channels.

We encourage you to read this Statement closely. If you have any questions regarding anything stated here or otherwise regarding our privacy work or handling of cookies and other technologies, you are welcome to contact us by using the contact information in Section 8. For any questions or help with the Viaplay service, we refer to help.viaplay.com or our customer service.

Data controller and service provision for Viaplay UK customers

Viaplay is a service provided by Viaplay Group UK Limited, corporate identification number 02228654, with address Chiswick Green, 610 Chiswick High Road, W4 5RU London. Viaplay Group UK is a joint data controller together with Viaplay Group Sweden AB (together referred to as Viaplay Group), for the processing of personal data under this Statement and will use your personal data as is described below. You can exercise your rights by using the contact details under section 8 below.

Data controller and service provision for PMBL customer

If you have purchased your subscription through Premier Media Broadcasting Limited, then Viaplay will be provided to you by Viaplay Group Ireland Limited (under change of name from Premier Media Broadcasting Limited), corporate identification number 620991, registered office at Broadcasting House, 3a Prince's Street South, Dublin 2, D02 A520, Republic of Ireland. Viaplay Group Ireland is a joint controller together with Viaplay Group Sweden AB (together referred to as Viaplay Group), for the processing of personal data under this Statement and will use your personal data as is described below. You can exercise your rights by using the contact details under section 8 below.

1.1 Minors

You must be at least 18 years of age to create a Viaplay account. We do not knowingly market towards, nor collect personal data regarding minors. Minors may only use Viaplay with the involvement, supervision, and approval of a parent or legal guardian. Parents or legal guardians are strongly recommended to set up a children’s profile, which will filter out any content deemed inappropriate for minors, before letting children use Viaplay.

1.2 Third party services, devices, and links

Please note that in some situations, we are not the only ones who process your personal data when you enjoy Viaplay’s content. For example, when you use Viaplay on your game console or smart TV, then the company that provides you with that console or TV may also process your personal data as an independent data controller, with no connection to what is written in this Statement. The same applies if you click a link that leads you to a third-party website. In these cases, such company’s corresponding information on data protection will also apply to you. If you choose to use Viaplay through a third-party player (such as Apple Tv etc.) you might also be asked to share certain personal data with or from such third-party player. You will receive information about possible sharing before it is carried out. You can find more information about the third parties having access to your personal data in section 3.

2. How we process your personal data

In this section, we explain how your personal data is used for us to provide you with Viaplay and related relevant experiences, services, offers and our interest in improving the service.

Personal data means any information that can be linked to you either directly or indirectly. It could be your name, e-mail address, phone number, credit card number, IP address, viewing history and information about interests and preferences.

2.1 What kind of personal data do we process and how do we collect it?

We can collect your personal data in several ways:

2.1.1 Information that you provide us with directly, for example when using Viaplay, communicating with our customer service, participating in a contest, or answering surveys

  • name, email address, telephone number, home address including postal code, date of birth or age, payment details (see section 2.2.6 below) and other information you provide under the respective profiles when creating and/or maintaining your user profile,
  • correspondence when you contact us (recordings of phone calls, emails, chat, etc.),
  • email address, home address or phone number when you sign up for receiving our marketing communications,
  • information that you provide whilst participating in a contest,
  • where applicable and requested, your preferences in relation to content you are interested in, if you choose to share such information with us,
  • user information that you choose to provide such as ratings, reviews and responses to surveys,
  • data related to your social media account when you share content from Viaplay or contact us through social media (please note that the social media provider’s own privacy policies will also apply to you when acting under your social media account),
  • username and password.

2.1.2 Data generated when you use Viaplay

While you are enjoying the content on Viaplay, we gather and further process data about your use of the service.

The gathered data is processed, among other things, based on your behaviour and is connected to your specific user profile to give you a personalized experience. You can always create additional user profiles to have a tailored profile for each person within your household using Viaplay (please note that everyone with access to your account will have access to all the user profiles).

Furthermore, and subject to your cookie settings, your browsing behaviour on our platforms during your logout experience may also be linked to you and used to provide you with a personalized experience once you log in (see further in section 2.2.1 below).

Data generated through use of Viaplay:

  • Information about the user profile’s behaviour, such as viewing behaviour, streaming history, content in “My list”, where a user profile left off a stream (the functionality called “continue watching”), and how the profile navigates through the service,
  • Country of residence (the country you signed up for), and location (the country you are accessing the content from),
  • Other data collected through cookies or similar technologies, about your visits on Viaplay platforms. Some of the cookies used on any Viaplay platform may be used for marketing purposes (see section 2.2.3 to read more about Marketing and learn more about how we use cookies here).
  • Limited information about your social media account, such as your email address, when you share Viaplay content on your social media (however, we do not use such information for any purpose).

2.1.3 Data we share or obtain from external sources

Sometimes, we share or obtain personal data from other sources. This sharing of data is necessary either for us or the sharing party. For example:

  • We share data within our group of companies to achieve our business purposes and to enable marketing of our services, in compliance with legal requirements,
  • We share and receive information with and from payment service providers that enable you to pay for your subscription or any content you are buying or renting on Viaplay,
  • We may need to share and receive information to give you access to Viaplay via one of our business partners, distributors and other third parties where Viaplay is integrated,
  • We may obtain information if we have a legitimate interest in collecting such information from an official body regarding e.g., a claim that concerns us directly or indirectly.
  • We share or disclose non-personal data, such as aggregated information like the total number of advertisement interactions and online conversions, with advertising platforms to understand the impact of Viaplay’s digital marketing campaigns.

2.2 For what purposes do we use your personal data and what legal basis is used?

We process your personal data for a variety of purposes, all under the umbrella of providing you with Viaplay. Each purpose is connected to a so-called legal basis, which we rely upon to lawfully process your personal data. A legal basis could be performance of contract, meaning that the processing is carried out by us to fulfil our contractual obligation to you, which is created for example when you accept our Terms. We may also use legitimate interest as a legal basis, meaning that our reason for processing personal data outweigh any prejudice to your data protection rights. In order for us to do so, we always perform a balancing test to ensure that we have considered and weighed any privacy impact in relation to the interest in question. We consider what is necessary and reasonably expected by you, but also how to minimise any impact on your data protection rights, for example by always pseudonymising data where possible. If you object to your personal data being processed based on our legitimate interests, you can contact us using the contact information under section 8 below. We could at times also ask for your consent to use your data. If consent is the legal basis, you are always given the option to withdraw your consent at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal. Lastly, we may at times have a legal obligation to process your data.

Below are the various purposes for which we process your personal data, including the applicable legal basis for such processing.

2.2.1 Provision of Viaplay

We process your personal data to administer and provide you with Viaplay, such as to:

  • identify you as a customer and/or user,
  • charge for the services you use (administer invoices and payments) and ensuring recurrency of subscription payments,
  • ensure the technical functionality of Viaplay,
  • provide you with tailored and personalized content based on your viewing and browsing behaviour as well as other information you provide us with (read more about personalisation here)
  •  provide you with customer service,
  • remedy faults and deal with complaints addressed by you,
  • notify you of changes to our services.

Legal basis: Performance of contract and legitimate interest

2.2.2 Improving Viaplay

We process your personal data, such as information on how you use Viaplay, to develop and improve our services, for example by:

  • compiling different types of data, such as viewing behaviour, into statistics for analytical needs, for example to see what content that is successful on the service and what is not, what features that can be improved and how to make the navigation on the service more user-friendly
  • allowing you to provide feedback through different customer surveys (sometimes based on your viewing and user behaviour within Viaplay) for the reasons mentioned in the point above but also to ensure that we meet customer expectations and can continue to raise customer satisfaction, and
  • understanding, diagnosing, troubleshooting, and fixing issues in our services.

Furthermore, and subject to your cookie settings, we may also use data connected to your logout experience to run A/B and other website testing, as part of our efforts to improve our website’s content and understand what works best for our visitors.

In most cases, any analysing of data is performed based on pseudonymised data that is separated from your customer account.

Legal basis: Legitimate interest and consent

2.2.3 Marketing

We may use your e-mail address, home address or phone number in order to provide you with offers, news, recommendations etc. to market our services or, where you have consented thereto specifically, our partner’s services. We may provide you with personalized marketing based on your viewing behaviour and how you have used our services to better tailor offers that might be of interest for you. We may also use your personal information when you choose to participate in our marketing campaigns, e.g., in relation to our Refer-a-Friend framework or similar.

Depending on your jurisdiction and local law requirements, when you sign up to Viaplay you are always provided with the option to (i) opt-in or (ii) opt-out of our marketing communications. If you no longer wish to receive marketing efforts from us, you can notify us at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in each email message or by changing your "My Account" settings.

In addition, your personal data may be used for digital marketing purposes, for among others to create segments, focus groups or to send you targeted advertising on social media and digital ad spaces, subject to either our legitimate interest or applicable consent requirements. You can find more information about the consent requirements for the cookies we use in our cookie policy.

Legal basis: Legitimate interest or, where required by applicable national law, consent

2.2.4 Communication with you

We process your personal data when communicating with you, such as when you contact us for questions by phone, e-mail and social media chat or when you participate in surveys, competitions or usability testing we conduct. Such communication can be recorded and stored for educational purposes, to improve our communications and for quality assurance and to be able to document what has been agreed with you. Remember that if you are communicating with us through social media, then the social media’s information on processing of personal data applies as well.

Our customer service team is outsourced to professionals, meaning that your personal data will be processed by a separate company, but on our behalf, when communicating with us. We have contractually ensured that your personal data will be processed by them in accordance with our instructions in the same way as if we were handling the customer service ourselves. For more information on who we might share your personal data with, please see section 3 below.

Legal basis: Legitimate interest and performance of contract

2.2.5 Prevent security breaches and abuse of our services, and practice our right to establish, exercise or defend legal claims

We process your personal data to ensure the security of all our services, in order to detect or prevent various types of unlawful use or use that otherwise violates our terms. We also process data to prevent abuse as well as to detect and prevent fraud, virus attacks, copyright infringement etc. We may also process personal data to practice our right to establish, exercise or defend legal and other official claims in front a court or other authority. For these purposes we might request and take part of official documents.

Legal basis: Legitimate interest and performance of contract

2.2.6 To process payment details for defined purposes

We store the following credit card data:

  • the first six and last four digits of your card number to be able to support you if have forgotten your username,
  • expiration date to send you reminders when your payment card is about to expire, and if you need to update the card on the Viaplay service,
  • card alias to identify if this card has been used by another account,
  • issuing country used for portability reasons to confirm your home country, and
  • card type and last four digits of your card number to allow you to identify which of your payment cards has been registered.

Please note that your payment details are otherwise processed directly by our payment providers, who are independent controllers of your personal data and process such data under their own applicable privacy policies, for the purpose of charging you for our services and content.

Legal basis: Legitimate interest and legal obligation

2.2.7 To comply with legal obligations and requests from courts/authorities

We also process your personal data when we are required to do so by law, e.g., by virtue of our obligation to keep books or to where obligated to respond to requests from courts and other authorities.

Legal basis: Legal obligation

3. Who do we share your personal data with?

At times, it is necessary for us to share your personal data to achieve the purposes we have collected it for. For example, we may share your personal data with:

  • Any of the companies within our Group, for example for marketing purposes and for the development of new, or improvements of, existing services,
  • External partners and suppliers, both inside and outside the UK/EEA (for more information please see section 5), for example, to provide assistance in customer surveys, marketing efforts, analyses and statistics and for certain customer communications, for the provision of IT and other infrastructure, to manage credit and payment transactions, to protect our property and rights, and to ensure the security of our customers and employees,
  • Partners if you participate in surveys or competitions within our services,
  • Recipients where legal requirements, regulations or official decisions so require, such as to law enforcement or data protection authorities to respond to valid legal processes, such as warrants, court orders or subpoenas.
  • Prospective purchasers of our business in case we sell or negotiate to sell our business to a buyer or prospective buyer. We will always inform you before a transfer of your data is carried out to a buyer or becomes subject to a different privacy Statement.
  • Third party entities placing their cookie files or plug ins on our website, allowing them to collect specific information about your use of the website and services (more information available in our Cookie Policy).

4. For how long do we keep your personal data?

Your personal data is stored for as long as it is necessary to achieve the specific purposes for which the data was collected or as required by applicable law, after which it is deleted or completely anonymised. In this section you will learn about our different retention periods, which are specified further below. Please note that personal data may be processed beyond the retention periods below, if the data is considered necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims or complaints before a court or other authority. If that is the case, the personal data in question will be deleted immediately once such claim or complaint has become final.

Data collected as part of your use of Viaplay

  • Data related to your account. This includes, among other things, your account details, such as log in credentials, information about the services and content bought on Viaplay, user and viewing behaviour etc. We retain your personal data for the duration of your account. If you ask to delete your account or your account is deleted due to inactivity on your part (please see details below regarding inactivity), your personal data will become anonymized or deleted.
  • Data related to crash logs and files. We process information about errors and crashes of the services to ensure the technical functionality of Viaplay. The data is processed for a period of 3 months from the collection date.
  • Data about transactions and purchases. We process information about transactions related to your account and performed in connection with purchases through Viaplay for a period of 7 years after the transaction date.

Data collected to comply with our legal obligations and enforcement requests.

When we process your personal data to comply with or to fulfil our legal obligations or enforcement requests, e.g. to keep books, issue invoices, respond to legal enforcement requests, warrants, search orders or subpoenas, we will process your personal data for a period specified in applicable laws.

Data collected through customer service or other communications with you.

We process personal data collected when responding to your questions, complaints and requests, including data contained in the content of messages sent to us, for the period necessary to respond to the inquiry, complaint or request, but no longer than for a period of 3 years, in the case of logs and text dialog, and for a period of 1 month, in case of voice recordings. If a particular message constitutes or may constitute evidence in a proceeding before a court or other authority, we may retain such messages and the personal data contained therein until such proceeding has become final.

Data collected from surveys you participate in.

We process information received from you when you have participated in a survey, including about your answers to questions in various surveys relating to the services sent by Viaplay, for the duration of your account or as described from time to time depending on the particular survey.

Data collected when you participate in competitions.

We process information collected about you when you have participated in a competition for a period of 6 months after the competition.

Data collected when you participate in usability testing.

We process information collected about you when you have participated in testing for a period of 12 months after the testing.

Data processed for direct marketing purposes.

When we process your personal data for the purposes of direct marketing, we will keep the data until you ask to be opted out from marketing efforts or object to such processing.

Data collected via cookie files or other technologies.

We store personal data of service users and website users (non-logged users) contained in cookie files for a period corresponding to the life cycle of specific cookie files stored on your devices. Details on how we use cookies can be found here.

If you have been inactive on our services for a period of 48 months, we will delete your account and the personal data contained therein as described in this section. You are considered inactive if you have not bought any content (such as a movie, pay per view etc), logged in or used Viaplay or your account in any way, either directly or through one of our partners, for the prescribed period. Please note that if you have purchased the rights to a movie or other content, your account will remain active for as long as the licensed period is valid.

5. Children’s Privacy

We may share your personal data with partners, suppliers and subcontractors located outside the UK/EEA. Other than the UK/EEA, the recipients of your personal data are located in among others, Ukraine and the US. Your data is stored on servers within the UK/EEA but can be in a regulated manner be accessed by our suppliers in the referenced countries.

In such cases, we take special safeguards, by performing detailed transfer impact assessments. If personal data is transferred to a country not recognized by the UK and/or European Commission as ensuring an appropriate level of protection of personal data (EU list available here / UK list available here), we implement appropriate contractual, technical, and organizational measures in addition to, where applicable, the Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission and the ICO in (i) the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or (ii) the UK addendum (you can obtain the copy of those elements by contacting in accordance with Section 8 below).

6. How do we protect your personal data?

We protect your personal data through technical and organizational security measures which we also enforce upon the suppliers that we use to carry out our business. We have strong policies on retention, information security, access rights etc. and regularly educate our staff around these issues.

All payment transactions are encrypted using widely recognized technologies in the industry and are subject to security standards from the PCI (Payment Card Industry) Security Standards Council.

Your account is protected through, among other, your password. We encourage you to update it on a regular basis and to not use the same password as you would use for other accounts and applications.

7. Your rights

You have the following rights in relation to us (if you wish to exercise any of your rights, you can contact us via the contact details in the next section):

  • right of access (register statement) — a right to obtain confirmation and information about your personal data processing,
  • right to rectification — a right to have erroneous information corrected,
  • right to deletion — a right to under certain circumstances have data removed,
  • right to restriction — a right to require restriction of personal data processing, for example, if you object to the accuracy of data,
  • right to objection — a right to object to processing based on legitimate interest, such as direct marketing,
  • right to data portability — a right to require that personal data be moved from us to another party (this right is limited to data provided to us by you); and
  • right to withdraw your consent – when the processing is based on your consent, you can withdraw it at any without affecting the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal.

If you believe that our processing of your personal data is not carried out in accordance with the data protection laws and regulations, we ask you to please let us know so that we can investigate the matter. You also have the right to file a complaint with a supervisory authority, in particular in the UK or EEA country of your habitual residence or place of work. In the EEA, our Lead Supervisory Authority is the Swedish Data Protection Authority (more information available here). The UK supervisory authority can be contacted here.

8. Contact information

If you wish to exercise any of your rights as described under section 7 above or need help from our customer service, such requests shall be sent to privacy@viaplay.com.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns regarding this Statement or how we work with personal data, we welcome you to contact our Data Protection Officer by email at the following address: dpo@viaplaygroup.com

9. Updates of this Statement

We may update this Statement as considered necessary from time to time. Should any changes be significant regarding how we process your personal data, we will inform you in an appropriate manner prior to the changes come into effect, for example by sending you an email or by providing you with a clear notice when you access Viaplay. We recommend that you read such information carefully and keep yourself up to date by regularly visiting this Statement.

This Statement was last updated on 01.02.2024.

Thank you for taking your time to read this Statement! For more information on Viaplay Group’s privacy work, see here.