Please wait...
Please wait...

Touching Nollywood

Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, is fast developing into a global brand thanks to new VoD platforms. But is such growth built on solid foundations, asks Clive Whittingham.

Jason Njoku

When Jason Njoku started Nigerian VoD service iROKOtv he had to collect the films on a hard drive and fly them back to the UK to upload because the local internet connection was so slow and expensive.

iROKOtv is described in some quarters as the Netflix of Nollywood. Njoku and financial backer Bastian Gotter saw a gap in the market where all Nollywood content was being dumped on YouTube for free.

By introducing the industry to the idea of digital licences in 2010 they opened up another revenue stream for the producers. US investment company Tiger Global was impressed enough to plough US$8m into the venture, of which US$5m went on stocking a catalogue with 5,000 movies.

It has recently been joined on the African VoD scene by Pana TV, a South African venture that brought former MNet acquisitions exec Mandy Roger onboard earlier this year to stock its library with 5,000 hours for launch last month.

Pana focuses mainly on entertainment programming, and aims to be 70/30 weighted in favour of original commissions within three years, but has picked up Nollywood titles already. A deal with Samsung will see the Pana app pre-installed on every piece of the electronics giant’s kit sold on the African continent.

Bastian Gotter

Then there’s Afrinolly, which achieved half a million downloads in its first 10 months of offering Nollywood content online. Afrinolly and iROKOtv, however, have been involved in a legal dispute about whether the former is making money from content the latter has paid to have exclusively.

But to a certain degree aren’t all these new platforms simply castles built on sand? Broadband penetration across the continent is patchy and iROKOtv and Pana both say their main target audience, for now, is the African diaspora around the world. Nigerian capital Lagos is still a city that struggles for a regular electricity supply.

Solutions are being found. Pana will soon announce a deal with the creators of a technology that will allow streaming on mobiles and tablets even when the signal is low.

“It means even small outlying villages will be able to stream unbuffered the content from our website,” says Roger, now chief operating officer at Pana. “The worst case scenario is it will be a little on the grainy side, but for the outlying villages that’s better than what they currently have. That will change the whole market completely.”

Emeka Mba

Emeka Mba, director general of Nigeria’s National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), says he’s encouraged by the willingness to see the challenges as gaps in the market, rather than insurmountable problems.

“The challenges we have are bandwidth, technology and electricity -– and people are finding ways of getting around those,” he says. “The new crop of people coming into Africa see them as opportunities and if it’s a problem they fix it.”

And it could be that Africa is actually better placed than some more developed parts of the world to capitalise on technological progress. The continent may bypass the PC/laptop phase of development altogether and move straight to the boom in mobiles and tablets.

Russell Southwood, CEO at African media consultancy and research firm Balancing Act, says he believes the continent will “get mobile media right in a way the rest of the world hasn’t been able to because it’s the media most people use.”

iROKOtv

“YouTube is already in the top five sites. Even when the bandwidth is terrible YouTube is right up there,” Southwood says. “It’s what people want, and they’re patient. There are half a dozen 4G LTE implementations in Africa and there will be a dozen by the end of the year. That will make it much easier to deliver video content.

“The tool to deliver video is already in front of people. There has already been an upsurge in film and music platforms online. It’s just like Eastern Europe was 10 years ago, and you have to be there at the start.”

Jessica Hope, communications director at iROKOtv, says: “For us, we can’t wait for Africa to come online. When it does our company will work completely differently.”

Please wait...