Nigeria's movie industry goes digital
Iroko Partners to salvage Nollywood ?
To what seems to have been a long and obvious challenge to one of the world's largest movie industries (larger than both Hollywood and Bollywood themselves, in terms of number of movies produced per year), Jason ChukwumaNjoku took the first opportunistic step to tackle the issues that the giant Nigerian film industry have been dealing with.
ChukwumaNjoku founded Iroko Partners who recently announced multi-year licensing deals with Nigerian movie producers. The company will distribute the licensed films digitally, via a Youtube channel entitled Nollywood Love.
It has been no secret that Distribution has been the bottleneck of Nigeria's $250 Million Dollar movie industry. With about 500 to 1000 movies a year with an average production cost of about $15,000, the industry is known for its lack of regulatory control and high piracy rates. Despite these hindering problems, Nollywood knows a great local and global audience, and content producers have not gotten a fair opportunity to fully monetize from their entire potential market.
Looking forward as to how these content partnership deals affect the Nigeria's movie industry, I believe it will result in two main positives:
1) More revenues and profits for the content producers. Iroko Partners present itself as a legitimate distribution channel for the Nigerian studios. It gets its own revenue from Advertising on the youtube channel, and pays the studios a licensing fee. Comparing this process to the risk of releasing a DVD and having it copied and re-distributed with no legal control, this licensing revenue should be much more attractive to the producers to effectively monetize their movies. Additionally, the transparency of the youtube channel would enable the studio to get a good idea of the success of a particular movie and allow it to better price each movie's license. Which brings us to the second advantage...
2) Better analytics. Before this deal, Nollywood did not have Hollywood's equivalent of a Box Office to know how each movie is performing and which is a hit. With Nollywood Love, the analytics provide a great tool to monitor information such as number of users, minutes spent on movie, scenes forwarded/rewinded, etc. Iroko can then sell or simply feedback this analytics to the movie studios to better understand what is important to the Nollywood consumer and also influence the types of movies whose licenses they will be purchasing in the future. Overall, this will add value to every player in the Nollywood industry: Movie Studio, Legal Digital Distributors, Consumers.
Iroko Partners to salvage Nollywood ?
To what seems to have been a long and obvious challenge to one of the world's largest movie industries (larger than both Hollywood and Bollywood themselves, in terms of number of movies produced per year), Jason ChukwumaNjoku took the first opportunistic step to tackle the issues that the giant Nigerian film industry have been dealing with.
ChukwumaNjoku founded Iroko Partners who recently announced multi-year licensing deals with Nigerian movie producers. The company will distribute the licensed films digitally, via a Youtube channel entitled Nollywood Love.
It has been no secret that Distribution has been the bottleneck of Nigeria's $250 Million Dollar movie industry. With about 500 to 1000 movies a year with an average production cost of about $15,000, the industry is known for its lack of regulatory control and high piracy rates. Despite these hindering problems, Nollywood knows a great local and global audience, and content producers have not gotten a fair opportunity to fully monetize from their entire potential market.
Looking forward as to how these content partnership deals affect the Nigeria's movie industry, I believe it will result in two main positives:
1) More revenues and profits for the content producers. Iroko Partners present itself as a legitimate distribution channel for the Nigerian studios. It gets its own revenue from Advertising on the youtube channel, and pays the studios a licensing fee. Comparing this process to the risk of releasing a DVD and having it copied and re-distributed with no legal control, this licensing revenue should be much more attractive to the producers to effectively monetize their movies. Additionally, the transparency of the youtube channel would enable the studio to get a good idea of the success of a particular movie and allow it to better price each movie's license. Which brings us to the second advantage...
2) Better analytics. Before this deal, Nollywood did not have Hollywood's equivalent of a Box Office to know how each movie is performing and which is a hit. With Nollywood Love, the analytics provide a great tool to monitor information such as number of users, minutes spent on movie, scenes forwarded/rewinded, etc. Iroko can then sell or simply feedback this analytics to the movie studios to better understand what is important to the Nollywood consumer and also influence the types of movies whose licenses they will be purchasing in the future. Overall, this will add value to every player in the Nollywood industry: Movie Studio, Legal Digital Distributors, Consumers.
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