Jason Njoku’s iROKO has sealed a deal with Vivendi-owned Canal Plus Group to launch a mobile SVOD service in Francophone Africa.
Though the amount involved is undisclosed, this multi-million euro deal sees C+O and iROKO co-brand an app and spend the next few years curating some of the best content available in French speaking Africa.
Jason Njoku promises in his blog post that the Android / Mobile only offering will be as affordable as possible, and the focus as in English speaking Africa will be on data lite optimised downloads and content which people love.
The iROKO app is expected to cater for over 250 million French-speakers across 23 countries in Africa, with growth in smartphones expected to grow to 165m by 2020.
This is what Jacques du Puy, president of Canal Plus Overseas has to say; “Now that Canal Plus is close to having two million pay TV households in Africa, our ambition is to widen our audience to those whose mobile is the main entertainment device. iROKO’s original approach integrating popular content production and mobile SVOD perfectly matches our group’s entertainment vision in French- Speaking Africa.” “This will also allow us to make more accessible the contents that we specifically produce and design for the African market.”
Jason Njoku, CEO of iROKO added, “iROKO has been committed to leading viewers to content they will love and Canal+ Overseas shares our vision, translated into French. Canal+ has over 20 years’ experience of delivering content to Francophone Africa, we have an unrivalled Nollywood content catalogue and have pioneered VOD in Africa. Together, we will be giving the many millions of French-speaking Nollywood and Telenovela fans unprecedented access to content that has previously been inaccessible. We believe truly amazing, yet affordable content is the right balance to strike in Sub-Saharan Africa and this deal is testament to that.”
