Five years ago, Jason Njoku set out on his entrepreneurial journey.
He had one simple plan; set Nollywood free. At the time, Nollywood,
Nigeria’s entertainment village, was pretty popular. It was the world’s
third biggest movie industry, only topped by America’s Hollywood and
India’s Bollywood. But Jason saw a bigger opportunity. Despite
Nollywood’s popularity, it was barely visible beyond its home market and
parts of West and Southern Africa, therefore, taking it online would
make it more accessible to the West, and more importantly Nigerians in
Diaspora. It was a brilliant idea. Nigerians in Diaspora were equipped
with better internet infrastructure and a fairly higher income than most
at home, making it the right blend to attract subscription and revenue.
Since it took off in 2011, iROKOtv, the brand under which Jason
floated his Nollywood business idea, has attracted more than $26 million
from investors and channel subscriptions in Africa grew from 3 percent
to 11 percent of the user base in 2014, at a y-o-y rate of 457 percent.
However, the last few months have seen the original plan tweaked a bit.
iROKOtv has introduced Hollywood series into its offerings and has
hinted that it plans to showcase blockbuster movies from the American
movie industry. This begs the question:
Has Nollywood streaming lost its
appeal?
Jason doesn’t think so. He told me in an email last week that his
primary aim was to set Nollywood content free and give it the
distribution platform it deserved. “I believe we’ve done that, and more”
he acclaimed. adding that the company’s decision to diversify its
product offerings was motivated by its existing consumers. Jason goes on
to discuss the impact iROKOtv has had on the Nigerian movie industry
and plans it has for the future.
It’s been about 5 years since the revolutionary
iROKOtv took off, can you summarize the progress it has made within this
short space?
In five years, we’ve transitioned from my two room
apartment in Festac with a team of less than 20, streaming Nollywood
movies on YouTube, into a VC-backed dedicated SVOD (subscription
video-on-demand) platform with a global team of over 100 with offices in
Lagos, New York, Johannesburg and Kigali. We’ve gone from simply
licensing movies from producers, to co-producing our own movies, as well
as selling content to broadcasters around the world, as well as
in-flight services. As of this week, we have also diversified our
distribution to include linear TV, having launched two TV channels,
IROKO Play and IROKO Plus, on StarTimes.
In short, we’ve totally disrupted and reorganised the distribution of Nollywood.
Has iROKOtv been able to achieve (or a significant part) of the vision it stated during inception?
Our vision was really quite simple – to set Nollywood
content free and give it the distribution platform it deserved. I
believe we’ve done that, and more. We’ve not only brought Nollywood to a
much larger, global audience, but through our considerable investment,
we’ve also helped to elevate the quality of what’s now being released.
Producers are now able to better monetize their content and can reinvest
their higher profit margins into better facilities, equipment and so
on. I hope that we have had a positive effect on Nollywood, improving
the industry for both producers / directors, as well as fans.
What is (or are) the most prominent challenge(s) iROKOtv has faced so far?
Carving out a whole new distribution model for an entire
film industry has seen many challenges – very few of them are
insurmountable but they do require huge investments, not only in money,
but also time. Technology has been the most consistent challenge we’ve
had to face throughout the company’s existence. Unlike our VOD
counterparts around the world, we’re working in a bandwidth-light
environment, where the majority of our audience doesn’t have access to
fast or cost-effective internet, which means we have to really consider
how we optimize our site and compress our content so that one film
doesn’t eat up a viewer’s entire data allocation. We’re working on an
Android app at the moment which will, we hope, address a lot of the
problems that our viewers in Africa are presented with.
Will you say iROKOtv has been able to help address the issues (e.g piracy) the Nollywood?
We’ve challenged the pirates online, by ensuring any
content that is legally licensed to us but is found streaming illegally
on other sites, is taken down. In terms of the wider issue of pirated
hard copies of movies, that’s an industry that grows ever more
sophisticated each day, and is something that needs to be tackled by the
industry as a whole. I’m sad to say that Nollywood piracy is bigger
than IROKO, we cannot fight it on our own.
Has iROKOtv been able to alter the status quo,
particularly in the sales and distribution aspect of the movie industry
value chain?
We’ve not just altered the status quo, we’ve redefined the
industry and added inexorable value, having developed and pioneered a
whole new distribution arm for Nollywood, pumping millions of dollars
into the industry and giving viewers a better choice of what they can
watch, wherever they are. We don’t do ‘status quo’ at IROKO – we’re
continuously looking to disrupt wherever possible. We don’t stand still
and we don’t accept the norm.
We noticed that iROKOtv recently added foreign content (series shows) to its content offering. What motivated this strategy?
Our audience motivated this strategy. We speak to IROKOtv
viewers all day every day, to garner a sense of how they use the site,
what content they want to see, what we can improve upon etc. and it was
clear from our viewers in Africa that whilst they loved Nollywood, they
also wanted better access to international content, but were unable to
pay for costly pay TV subscriptions. This is why we launched IROKOtv.com
Africa last year, to bring international content, at a good price, to
Africa. Our audience speaks, we listen, we put into place.
Will you say Nollywood streaming is losing the hype with implementation of this new strategy?
Not at all – our first love and the core of our business is
Nollywood – that will remain the case for many, many years to come.
With the introduction of international content to our catalogue, we
wanted to complement our Nollywood movies and provide additional content
to our loyal fanbase, as well as reach out to new audiences who may
prefer Bollywood or Telenovelas to Nollywood. It’s really just about
giving people a choice and broadening our appeal beyond a solely
Nollywood audience.
In the next 5 years, which of these scenarios is
likely to play out for iROKOtv: Luring more nollywood savvy customers or
building a much more diverse stream of content offering (more foreign)?
Both. But with a strong emphasis on Nollywood. Our ethos is
simple – setting content free and providing mass audiences, in Africa
and around the world, with the very best content at an affordable price.
