Bastian Gotter, COO of iROKO TV recently spoke to organisers of NigeriaCom conference and he provided some critical insight into the market dynamics of Nigeria’s broadcasting space, the value of adjusting consumer needs through the mobile channel and how internet connectivity is the greatest challenge and opportunity for Nigeria’s online industry.
What has been the big change at iROKO since last year? As the leading VOD platform for the continent what does Nigeria represent to your global business now?
As of 2015, we have introduced download functionality, moving away from streaming content in Africa. Why? We knew that our audience is on a mobile device, and that mobile device is predominantly Android. So we had to build for our audience. They are at the heart of our decision making. When it came to streaming, they were struggling. Seriously struggling – they didn’t have the bandwidth to stream a movie in its entirety and the data costs were too much. So that was a massive project for us, to build out this new App with download functionality.
Nigeria is a key market, perhaps the key market for iROKO. For too long, our user base here wasn’t even in the top ten – now it is number 3. It should be number 1 and this is what we’re working hard to achieve.
What do you think is the top challenge affecting your business in the region in 2015?
Internet connectivity for the majority of our audience. It has been the key challenge since we launched and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, until the cost of data comes down significantly and the quality of service increases. It is this factor that pushed us into building the iROKOtv Android App. In fact, having to consider a bandwidth-light environment such as the one we’re working in, underpins pretty much every product and engineering decision we make.
What are the trends you are seeing in creation and consumption of local content across Nigeria and West Africa, in the digital and TV space?
The key trend for us is mobile. Everyone says it, but it’s true. Mobile is the future of content delivery across Africa. In terms of content creation, there are more web-only series being produced. An African City is one example of such a series – we brought it on to iROKOtv last year and it’s been hugely popular.
Read the full interview here.
