iROKOtv investors back ‘Netflix of Africa’ with $19m funding

iROKOtv, the mobile entertainment group dubbed the Netflix of Africa, has secured $19m from investors including France’s Canal Plus to produce original content and expand across the continent.

News of the funding provides further evidence of investor interest in the region’s mobile technology start-ups, given the wide use of smartphones to access online services, rather than personal computers.
 
iROKOtv said its new investment will go towards financing and producing local content, and backing its product and engineering teams in both Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city, and New York. It will aim to produce at least 300 hours of original content in 2016 and to double that by 2018.

Having first launched in 2011 as a free-to-watch streaming website for Nigeria’s “Nollywood” movies — the world’s second-largest film industry by output — the Lagos-based group has since shifted to a “mobile only” subscription app strategy. Subscribers download an app and pay a monthly fee to watch unlimited movies.

 

Although smartphone data usage is still expensive in many African countries, costs are coming down rapidly, in line with the price of smartphones. In Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy, some Chinese-brand devices retail for the equivalent of less than $40.

iROKOtv has developed its app to stream films on low bandwidth so as not to deter customers who cannot afford large monthly data packages. While many of its 65,000 subscribers are in the African diaspora, not on the continent, iROKOtv faces competition from Netflix, which this month announced plans to enter 130 countries, including many African nations.

 

For iROKOtv the challenge will be to fight for new customers against Netflix. The California-based streaming video provider has 74m subscribers.

Source: Ft.com