Online film and music platform success in Africa

http://businesstech.co.za/news/internet/40904/online-film-and-music-platform-success-in-africa/
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There has a big upsurge in launches of online film and music platforms since user bandwidth has started to improve. But many are little more than technical platforms as they lack both content in depth and do not yet have significant user traffic. Two film platforms stand out as the exception to this rule: Nigeria’s iROKO Partners and Kenya’s Buni TV.

Online film platform, Buni TV reaches 2 million views in year and uses comedy shorts to drive traffic. This week Russell Southwood talks to the CEO and founder of Buni TV Marie Lora-Mungai.

In its first year Buni TV had 2 million views and 0.5 million unique visitors who watched 100,000 hours of content. 60% of the views came from Africa and 40% from elsewhere (largely from the USA and the UK). This geographic skew is very different to iROKO’s where the larger percentage is in the rest of the world, among Nigeria’s large diasporas.

In terms of content, visitors can see 200 films in the free-to-view area and there are 500 other embedded videos such as trailers and interviews:”We want to enrich the overall content and obviously there is no bandwidth cost to embedding.” In due course there will be many more films available on a pay-for basis.

Soon Lora-Mungai wants to offer pay-for movies but at the moment she has only working assumptions that will be tested by piloting different price levels. With the fremium model, you are subject to the “law of circles”. Imagine if you will, the outer circle is your free users and the inner circles get progressively smaller, the more you charge. Elsewhere it appears that 10% of free customers will pay something.

It is often said by the “wise heads” that Africans don’t pay for content. On the last session of Broadcast, Film and Music Africa 2013 last week, I was moderating a session on mobile TV and asked 70 or so audience members, how many of you buy pirate DVDs? 80% or so of the audience raised their hands.