Irokotv.com will not be available in Nigeria any more

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@Jason_Igwe_Njoku is making serious changes to Iroko in response to changing realities about the landscape. The one that struck me the most was that there would not be any online streaming in Nigeria any more - just apps.

Read more at his blog:
The Death of the .Com Part I
http://www.jason.com.ng/post/122179906625/the-death-of-the-com-part-1

I’m really looking to Part II. I think all entrepreneurs have lots to learn about assumptions about revenue, internet connectivity and willingness of African consumers to pay. Thoughts anyone? Baba @Jason_Igwe_Njoku, looking forward to your input.

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Bastian said at MWA2015 in April that he believes the future of consuming content is on small screens. This is clearly a case of skating to where the puck will be rather than following the puck.
Not suprised with the development, apps built with specific platform in mind should make for a better UX.

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Not much of a risk. Mobile was always were it was at in Nigeria. And yeah you can even tell our unwillingness to pay from the movie piracy culture. So this is really great and suited to the environment. This can obviously end up changing as disposable income increases and people become more willing to pay.

All other tech companies have to follow Jason’s lead. Our little startup/tech bubble is about to burst because people expect Nigerians to pay. The revenue generation model is hardly suited to the reality on ground

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Well

Product market fit takes time. Money or no money - 4years on average. if the .com is dead where does that put hotels.ng ?

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Well, very well. But I’ll love to chat and at the same time watch some movies on my phone.

Guess this is just the beginning of tech!

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Read the post.

Didn’t realize there was a land grab between the ISPs and Android. Is there one @jason_igwe_njoku? Your highlight on the ISPs meager userbase compared to Android’s already decided conquest in the post?

Should there be one, and should it even matter? That’s the only part of the post that lost me.

Anyone can explain pls.

[UPDATE] : I think I get it, Jason has been betting on the ISPs to push iroko subscription(recent pally with telcos etc), now he is looking to bet on an android focus play. Damn the teclso they can’t move brick.

Jason can afford to toy with 15% of iroko’s current user base. It’s a minority.

I must also point out that this runs a tad awry with the not too recent Download add-on.

With download comes the need to store, phones aren’t ideal for storage. [Download] Keep and watch later is for Desktop!

I can run a download client on my desktop (to aid download) but not my Android. And I definitely won’t seat 2 hrs staring at my small screen for feature length entertainment (eye-strain). Like I said it’s still a place for desktop.

Mobile > Streaming > Cloud

All 3 preceded each other in that order, won’t go into the details(timelines). To my make my point, with the birth of smaller computers (that’s what your smartphone is last last) came the need to stream those media content instead of save-and-watch, then came the cloud to relieve your smartphones the burden of a ‘document folder’.

Mobile experiences aren’t built for that the download experience. And that’s the only offering available to Iroko’s African audience.

If am asked I’d say iroko is trying to save cost with this death of the .com as they earlier did with swapping streaming for download, but nobody asked me. And what do I know…Jason is afterall is the f’ing dude.

(Natural bias to follow the data, no better than a natural bias for action).

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The Telcos are pushing the fixed price per movie download; this eliminates the worry of how long it takes to download a movie - they understand that folks are still sensitive on how much data (hence money) they are burning to stream or download.

In the longer run, the iroko.com will be back - however they want to force their users in Africa to make the change. Strategically this makes a lot of sense.

However, I believe that the MTN partnership has been a major boost. But is it enough to topple the competition in iROKOtv (yes, competition)? Probably not….yet. Jason Njoku won’t even acknowledge MTN Dobox as competition. If you’ve not read his post on defining competition, you probably should read it first. While he raised some really good points, I think he might be missing a few seemingly benign but, I dare say, very important details

Folks saw this coming…back in Jan 2014

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The only way streaming is a good experience is if you’re able to grab data faster than you can watch it. That’s not an easy feat to accomplish in Nigeria.

Here’s Netflix’s requirements to get that: Internet connection speed recommendations | Netflix Help Center

Basically, you need 1.5 Megabits per sec to stream standard definition from Netflix.

  1. We can safely assume Netflix has bigger and better infrastructure than Iroko.
  2. We can safely assume Netflix’s target audience are located much closer to where their data is stored than Iroko’s is because there are no major data stores in Africa.

So you’ll need better than that 1.5Megabits per second to smoothly stream if you’re in Africa versus America, Europe, Asia … or anywhere else, really.

What’s the internet speed look like in Nigeria?

The top city (Lagos) is averaged at 5.7Megabits per second. High enough to stream a normal quality movie comfortably. But what about the rest of the country?

If you look at the networks that have the fastest speeds according to the index, there’s only 1 mobile carrier listed - MTN. No glo, no etisalat, no airtel and most likely MTN on the index is due to some ISPs piggybacking MTN’s infrastructure.

Basically, it’s really hard to deliver a reliable and great quality streaming experience for mobile users in Nigeria.

The problem is that the people who these issues affect the most are likely to be the least knowledgeable about how to go about choosing the best option, so it makes sense to push everyone in the direction of success for the greatest number of people.

It’s better to just let them download the movie at their internet’s pace and enjoy watching it when the file is on their system. Storage space is anemic on mobile devices, but that’s a much smaller concern to fix. I’m pretty sure Iroko can afford to send any annual subscribers a free 16/32 GB SD card, which should allow you to store quite a few movies.

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Jason tho… When Bastian told him the future was mobile back then he disagreed.

I remember thinking about building a mobile competitor then… now years after Jason has realised bastian was right.

If I was an investor, Jason’s constant resetting of Iroko would be scary… but then i guess he can get away with it cause he’s building a startup and has revenues

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Jason said earlier this year that they’re working to compress a whole movie to about 50MB. So the storage and download problem becomes largely invalid

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This will be a big deal.

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If they can do this successfully, they’d be opening the gauntlet. I download games larger than 50MB so a movie for 50MB sounds pretty darn good to me.

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That will be a game changer for the mobile market

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I don’t think it would change anything. Imagine downloading a file >500 MB on a 5.0 inch mobile phone on a 3G network with your limited 4.5 GB data plan that you would rather use for something better like app updates and the likes. Well i wouldn’t do that if it were me. I think the desktop website experience should still be retained as most people in Nigeria and I think in Africa prefer downloading files >500 MB on their desktop because of the availability of download accelerator software for desktops.

The issue of memory space is another thing.

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A whole movie to 50MB!! WOW! Does this put into account the quality of the final compressed file? Because I think compressing a movie of say 1hr plus whose size is say 1GB to 50MB will result in a huge loss in quality. And if he thinks that because most users would be mobile users, that they would not notice the loss in quality. That’s not true.

Or is he thinking of hiring the services of Pied Piper from the Silicon Valley TV show. Because they are the only guys capable of pulling this kind of thing off. Just saying.

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What percentage of Iroko users are resident in Nigeria?

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Globally, where 85% of our revenues and subscribers lay, will remain untouched as streaming largely works just fine there. In Africa, we will essentially retire the .com. The several thousand existing African subscribers will have continued access to the website. New users will be unable to see the desktop reality.

Around 15% of subscribers are in Africa - likely the majority is Nigeria

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We can safely assume Netflix’s target audience are located much closer to where their data is stored than Iroko’s is because there are no major data stores in Africa.

I would assume iRokoTV is using service like AWS which allows you to stream contents from users location or at least region, that is the most common approach for any streaming/VOD service. Netflix has the capital to build such infrastructure.

Am I wrong?

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AWS doesn’t have any datacenters in Africa.

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Netflix uses AWS

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