Jason Njoku, founder of iROKO TV has announced that Nigeria has grown to become the company’s second largest market. He said the feat was recorded last week.
“Nigeria overtook the UK to become our #2 market in terms of active subscribers (in terms of revenue is a whole other matter). The US remains #1 by a pretty wide margin, but at year end, we expect that will change. Nigeria is q-o-q growing twice the rate as the US. And we haven’t really started moving Nigeria’s acquisition,”Njoku said.
He also revealed that the company records an average of 100,000 downloads per quarter in Nigeria via Android devices while some of its Nigerian users have become paid subscribers of the service.
“Inasmuch as we have grown our subscription base 515% in Nigeria over 2016, we still are very small compared to the other PayTV options,”Njoku admitted.
He also revealed the company’s next focus which is to build the Nollywood community.
“We believe in the Nollywood community. What we are now doing is building future features which bring the communities closer together. But those features need folks to be educated -they need their hands to be held. Hence the introduction of the kiosks a few months back. We have 65 deployed with a further 35 being deployed in Q1,”he said.
With the kiosk initiative, he revealed that they are attempting to achieve a lot – particularly going beyond data.
“We are utilising the Wifi Direct technology widely available in any and all file sharing services (xender/fileshare/flashshare et al) to firstly move files from agents to customers. Once it’s battle tested, we open up and allow person-to-person movie file sharing under the .iroko drm file storage framework. In order to watch the files you will 1. need the irokotv app installed, 2. need a valid subscription. That’s it. To check for a valid subscription requires <2mb in data (we’re trying to find a way around this). Yet for moving files? Zero. I am sure there will be mistakes along the way. It’s only 1.0 so will take a bunch of time to iron out any and all the bugs. In the end, the macro trend of increasingly inexpensive data will benefit us too. But for now, in the present, we are prepared for all realities. NCC enabled, or not,” he said.
