Africa’s leading telecoms company MTN has announced its acquisition of music streaming business, Simfy. This announcement was made by Group CEO and president Rob Shuter at the AfricaCom event currently taking place in Cape Town, South Africa.
Calling Simfy “Africa’s leading music-streaming business”, he said “It has a fantastic catalogue of music, access to more than 42 million tracks, arrangements with all of the major record labels. The architecture has just been completely rebuilt to be cloud-based, micro-services-based architecture built on Amazon Web Services and we are going to use this as our first big foray into MTN group digital OTT-like services.”
Shuter added that MTN will push Simfy into its own base across Africa and the Middle East.
“What is critical is we are going to run it OTT-like, as a separate business, a separate team and it is not going to be MTN branded. It will be an OTT service so even if you are in SA and using one of the other slow networks, you can still enjoy a fantastic music experience,” Shuter said.
Shuter said when it comes to rich media services, MTN believes music is one of the most important services, which has the most resonance, demand and interest from customers.
“We have historically operated as MTN Music; we have had different platforms in different markets. We have been a partner of other OTT streaming services but we think this is a fantastic vertical to make our first big step in building out our MTN portfolio.”
