iROKO attracts US$19MN funding


Details

Rebecca Hawkes

| 26 January 2016




Nollywood online entertainment platform iROKO has secured funding of US$19 million from French broadcaster Canal+ and returning investor Kinnevik.



Of this, $12 million is capital funding for the company’s business and technology development, while the remaining $7 million will be used for content development, according to TechCrunch.

The service, which can be viewed through a website or Android app, now offers up to 3,000 titles on demand (VOD), having financed and produced about 100 hours of content with Nigeria’s Nollywood studios in 2015.

iROKO now plans to collaborate with up to 20 studios on popular content such as romantic comedies, high drama and Christian themed-shows.

In addition, it is looking at ways to improve its service for mobile subscribers in Africa, who are challenged by the high cost of data and the slow, unreliable local Internet connections.

Jason Njoku, founder of iROKO, told TechCrunch that video streaming has been replaced by unlimited downloads for subscribers, adding that “the cost of streaming data was unimaginable to our customers, so we are in the process of re-encoding all our files to be between 50 to 100 megabytes”.

The content, which is predominantly made in Nigeria’s national language English, has recently been made available in French through a tie-up with Canal+, and the company is now looking to cater to West African audiences with added languages.

iROKO has raised a total of $34 million since its launch in September 2011 but reportedly hopes to generate positive cash flow by the end of 2016.