IROKOtv is a Nigeria based online video-on-demand service that wants to take Africa by storm. The company has seen some tough times recently but still managed to stay operational. Just a few months ago in April, iROKOtv shut down its London officein a move that will help itfocus more on the African market.
iROKOtv was launched on 1 December 2011 by iROKO partners, the largest licensors and distributors of Nollywood movies. The company had an ad-supported free service and a subscription-only service. The ad-supported free service was shut down back in April and all users are to be moved to the subscription based service dubbed known as iROKOtv Plus.
According to its CEO Jason Njoku, the move to a subscription only platform was because only 3% of its users were a paying and they generate 26 times more revenue than the free users combined. For this reason, it did not make sense for the company to continue supporting the free service.
To live up to its promise of expanding in Africa, the company is setting up shop in East Africa in the next 7 days. Its CEO said this on Twitter, “Expansion mode. IROKOtv East Africa. On route to Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. All in 7days.” This is quite a genius move for the company given that the East African market is wide open for anyone to take at this time.
Currently iROKOtv has over 75,000 paying subscribers and moving to East Africa will be very beneficial to them given that the broadband infrastructure over here is a little bit more developed than in other markets. Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda will join the other 170 countries where iROKOtv is active in.