The story of iROKOtv is one that motivates startup founders in Nigeria, across Africa – even beyond. The company started by taking Nigeria’s booming movie industry popularly called Nollywood online. Several years later and millions of dollars raised and spent, the company continues to innovate, re-innovate, emerge and reemerge much to the admiration of everyone including local and foreign media that christened iROKOtv Africa’s Netflix.
Interestingly, iROKOtv last month (April) announced a partnership with Netflix. Few days later, it sealed a deal with pay TV provider StarTimes to launch two dedicated African movies channel on the cable TV that serves homes across the continent.
In this interview, Gotter spoke to Innovation Village in Lagos on the latest developments at iROKOtv – including the company’s offline projects even though iROKOtv is still regarded as a tech company.
iROKOtv has lots of African movies produced in English language. Do you think you would have recorded much success and attracted much more users in Francophone African movies if you had added French movies from the outset?
At this point in time we’ve gathered a little bit of French movies. Nollywood (Nigeria’s movie industry) is by way the most powerful movie industry in Africa. That’s what sells. We have some Swahili and Afrikaans movies. But French is limited, it doesn’t sell as much as English movies for us. There might be businesses there and we are expanding for that in the coming years.
How does the deal with cable TV StarTimes to launch two movie channels connect to the goals of iROKOtv and what are you getting in return?
StarTimes is a big operator with large number of subscribers. We are providing them with a channel and we are getting paid to do so. We are providing the contents and also promoting our brand, movies and Nolllywood. It’s a no brainer that it is good deal for us.
News also broke about a deal with Netflix, what is the deal all about?
We sold some contents to Netflix.
How vast is the collection?
It is very small
iROKO started as an entirely online tech company but now we are seeing more offline moves by the company. Is iROKO gradually becoming an offline company?
Definitely we are going to cross the spectrum a bit more. We started as an online brand but we’ve also gone offline. We are going to transcend both worlds. We are still a tech company but we are changing the industry and we will be doing stuffs both online and offline – especially if it involves TV.
Where is more money coming from – online or offline?
Both sides generate significant revenues.
