24-hour live coverage of Sweden’s epic moose migration draws to a close

STOCKHOLM (AP) - The seventh season of Swedish slow TV hit "The Great Moose Migration" will end Sunday night after 20 days of 24-hour live coverage.

The show, called " Den stora älgvandringen " in Swedish, began in 2019 with nearly a million people watching. In 2024, the production hit 9 million viewers on SVT Play, the streaming platform for national broadcaster SVT.

By midmorning Sunday, the livestream's remote cameras captured 70 moose swimming across the Ångerman River, some 300 kilometers (187 miles) northwest of Stockholm, in the annual spring migration toward summer grazing pastures.

The livestream will end at 10 p.m. local time (2000 GMT) Sunday. It kicked off April 15, a week ahead of schedule due to warm weather and early moose movement.

Johan Erhag, SVT's project manager for "The Great Moose Migration," said this year’s crew will have produced 478 hours of footage - “which we are very satisfied with,” he wrote in an email to The Associated Press Saturday evening.

Figures for this year’s audience were not immediately available.

"The Great Moose Migration" is part of a trend that began in 2009 with Norwegian public broadcaster NRK's minute-by-minute airing of a seven-hour train trip across the southern part of the country.

The slow TV style of programming has spread, with productions in the United Kingdom, China and elsewhere. The central Dutch city of Utrecht, for example, installed a " fish doorbell " on a river lock that lets livestream viewers alert authorities to fish being held up as they migrate to spawning grounds.