Not saying you are wrong but there may be a bias if you are English speaking. As a person with a another language as english as my first, lots of the internet I see is in my native language. Lots of new music and movies is as well.
In the spirit of trading anecdotes: I'm Russian and I read and write an order of magnitude more in English than I do in Russian. Naturally, speaking is a different matter.
A lot of small countries have a local film industry, but don't expect large-scale unlimited budget productions like you'd see in Hollywood.
Generally, if you are a small country, you have to pour a lot of money into the industry to be able to even compete with Hollywood, otherwise the small market size doesn't make it worthwhile to produce anything. It's essentially the state paying for a public good, where the good is culture in your own language.
Swedish. Edit: The market for scandinavian language entertainment is perhaps 15 milion people. Not a lot and theese industries is in no way a golden ticket to unlimited fortunes but the output is pretty consintently high quality stuff.
I absolutely adore the melodic way Swedish and Norwegian sound (I know they are mutually intelligible). I also like Finnish, but i know that is Uralic and completely different. I really wish I could pick up the language. Is there anything high quality outside crime dramas and the like?
Books. Plenty of really good classics around. If you want simpler Swedish, perhaps start with Astrid Lindgren (children's books primarily) or Tove Jansson (also children's books in the book stores, but they have many undertexts and are appreciated on more levels the older you get).
What I find really interesting is that non-English speaking countries dub basically everything yet English speaking countries subtitle most of the time. Sometimes even things in English get subtitled (e.g. The Full Monty for the US market).
As a native English speaker dubbing drives me nuts. I want to see Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon subtitled not dubbed.
Why the preference? I know the French are super paranoid about the cultural hegemony of English. Is this the case elsewhere?
Interesting. I had the opposite perception. Most Europeans I know (Scandinavians, Germans, Dutch, British) prefer subtitles on movies (even when they are foreign non-English movies), whereas the impression I have gotten of Americans through e.g. news broadcasts and talkshows, have been that everything is dubbed into English (for example interviews from the EU parliament or other foreign countries). I am sure it depends on the context, but now I wonder if there are any statistics on when things are dubbed vs subtitled.
I am not sure if Europeans in general prefer subtitles. Most of my friend in Germany do. However, they are younger and well educated. Most people from my parent's generation probably would prefer dubs. It turns out that almost everything in Germany gets dubbed. You really gotta go out of your way if you want to see subs.
I wouldn't say news broadcasts and talk shows are a fair comparison here, as those are often watched passively (while cooking, cleaning, getting ready, chatting with friends) as opposed to film or dramatic television which are usually watched actively.
Dubbing also destroys immersion, which is bad for a story, but irrelevant for an interview. Rare is the dub where all the voice actors get all the emotion in the voice correct.
Actually it has a movie industry. Many movies from Czechoslovakia period are being considered "classic" and are still popular, with quotes from them being used all the time.
For foreign movies, there were also cases, when the dubbed versions were better (sounded better) than originals - for example Louis de Funès movies or MASH.
I'm Czech and a very large portion of the country doesn't speak any other language (not even Russian or German) at all, and they don't suffer from it at all.
What vacri said; also, nowadays, some people choose Russian (you have to pick one foreign language that you'll learn next 7 years - parents do the choice) because it's relatively simple compared to English for Slavic native speakers.
