The African Movie and TV has seen explosive growth spearheaded by the Nigeria’s Nollywood. In fact, film making in Nigeria alone employs about a million people, split equally between production and distribution, making it the country’s biggest employer after agriculture, according to the National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB). The industry has sales of $200m-300m a year. Nollywood’s appeal has reached far beyond Nigeria: its films are watched all over Africa, and beyond. In South Africa MultiChoice, a satellite-television business, offers a channel devoted to Nigerian films and now NextSpeel has an online streaming service for them. Currently the media company has 10 series running and over 100 videos and when we asked whether the company produces its own TV series, we were told that they simply buy Licenses of the episodes of the TV Series from producers. So how do they make money? According to Larry Oti; “We currently generate revenue through ads and we’ll eventually move to a subscription model with premium features”. Already Nigerian Movies/series are available as DVDs and broadcasted on various TV stations across the continent! Most the content is accessed through gigantic traditional TV sets that sit in our living rooms at specific times of the day. So what’s NextSpeel doing differently? According to Larry Oti, Founder of NextSpeel; Obviously, the main challenge with any multimedia internet streaming company in Africa is one — Bandwidth! Slow and costly internet speeds constraints at this point simply can’t make online streaming service compete with mainstream broadcasting companies in terms of the consumer experience and costs. To circumvent this monstrous challenge, Larry had this to say; The same approach is what YouTube is using for those users with slow internet speeds. It’s not the ultimate solution to the problem, but for now its the “pain killer” pill before ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and governments sort out this bandwidth problem once and for all. Until then though, traditional means of video content distribution most of which only support linear programming through terrestrial (mostly analogue broadcasting) and satellite like DSTV will still dominate the the entertainment and TV industry in Africa for quite a while!
