Nigeria in 2014: iROKOtv becoming Africa's Netflix with spillover benefits for Nollywood, Nigerian creative economy

iROKOtv, the Africa-based movie platform for Nigerian movies (known colloquially as ‘Nollywood’) has closed a funding round of $8 million, led by existing investor Tiger Global, with further participation from Sweden-based Kinnevik. A new investor to this round is US-based Rise Capital. This brings the total raised to $21 million, which makes iROKOtv one of the best well-funded internet companies in Africa today. iROKOtv a Video-on-Demand (VOD) platform for African content which claims one million monthly users. The new capital will be used to flip the company’s audience from a primarily Diaspora base to an African base, as well as migrating from a largely ad-supported model to subscription service. Obviously, the aim here is to become the Netflix for Africa. Currently, 50% of iROKOtv’s audience is located in the UK and US. It’s important to mention that Nollywood will continue to grow in 2014 as both content quality and market penetration improves. A long-run market equilibrium analysis of what makes Nollywood different from Hollywood; giving it a comparative/competitive advantage is shown below. Some of these include large small, medium sized enterprise with low factor input and cost leading to high output (when compared to western countries) yet sufficient to break-even. Nollywood’s popularity has spread throughout English-speaking Africa and has even gained traction in the African Diaspora of North America, Europe and the Caribbean (Olley, 2009). Increasing government support for Nollywood and industrial stimulus resulting from affordable digital filming and editing technology provide opportunity for real life “family-oriented-than-American-films” story lines of love, violence and HIV/AIDS that depicts the typical African struggle for livelihood amidst difficult economic condition brings the African Story to the world. Genres also usually include religion, the occult and rags-to-riches tales. It is expected that the industry will continue to build on this model and witness continued growth in 2014. Oh, can I talk about the booming Nigerian music industry?!

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Nigeria in 2014: Higher use of technology will lead to better governance

Since Barack Obama signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government on his first day in office, eventually led to Data.gov, African countries have also made efforts to have similar open data portal and Kenya in particular is playing leading role in this regard with the www.opendata.go.ke. The Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) is making similar effort with the www.nigerianstat.gov.ng. The story of governance in Africa though punctuated by war, coups de etat and not-so-democratic elections is also full of stories of democratic progress and innovation. Technology is playing a role on the demand side of governance with citizens taking to technology platforms to amplify their opinions and demand better services from governments. It’s playing a big role on the supply side as well with governments adopting e-government and making progress along the path to open government and turning Africa into an attractive place to live in and do business. Notable example include the Kenya Revenue Authority’s (KRA) Portal, Tanzania Revenue Authority e-Filing and mPayments, Rwanda Mobile-enabled Driving license applications and Liberia’s Online Company Registry. This economic and urban boom in cities like Lagos and Accra where existing public infrastructure systems -- from transportation, to water, sanitation, energy, healthcare, public safety, education and administration – is under increasing strain, technology could play a variety of roles to address these issues. Other areas to watch out for include electronic lands registries, integrated financial management systems and electronic business registration in an effort to improve service delivery in their government to government (G2G) interactions and G2C / G2B services. Of course the idea of cloud computing, big data and mobile technology will be interconnected areas of discourse in 2014.

Read the full article here: 10 Economic Highlights to look out for in Nigeria in 2014. Want to share you thoughts on the Nigerian Economy in 2014? You can drop your comment below or continue the discussion with on twitter Tweet to @seunoyeniran

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