French tv firm Canal+ has acquired the ROK movie studio from VOD firm IROKOtv for an undisclosed quantity.
Founded by Jason Njoku in 2010—and backed by $45 million in VC—IROKOtv boasts the most important on-line catalog of Nollywood movie content material on the planet.
Nollywood is a film style popularized in Nigeria that has change into Africa’s de facto movie business and one of many largest globally, by manufacturing quantity.
Based in Lagos, ROK movie studios was incubated to create authentic content material for IROKOtv, which will be accessed on-line anyplace on the planet.
Actress and producer Mary Njoku—IROKOtv CEO Jason Njoku’s spouse—based ROK studios and can keep on as Director General underneath the Canal+ acquisition.
Owned by media conglomerate Vivendi, Canal+ seems to provide Mary extra manufacturing sources, with out disrupting ROK’s artistic chemistry.
“We are acquiring the talent of Mary,” Canal+ Chief Content Officer Fabrice Faux advised TechCrunch on a name.
“We will provide administrative support, finance, and equipment, but otherwise it is our intention to give Mary maximum autonomy and creative freedom,” he stated.
Mrs. Njoku’s artistic work to date has led ROK to supply over 540 motion pictures and 25 authentic TV collection, in line with firm information.
Through ROK, Njoku has expanded Nollywood’s system for producing movies on low budgets, largely shot on location in Nigeria, that join with African audiences wherever they’re. One of ROK’s newer standard productions is Ojukwu, a interval collection set in an 1800s Nigerian village, wherein Njoku directs and acts.
“Nollywood is Africa…We tell the African story. You can bring a Nigerian story, a Ghanaian story, a South African story…we talk the same drama. So Africans can connect to the average Nollywood story anywhere in the world,” Njoku advised TechCrunch.
With the ROK acquisition, Canal+ seems to convey the Nollywood manufacturing ethos to different international locations and areas of Africa.
“It’s not that easy to produce an interesting movie for $20,000. People in Nigeria, particularly Mary and IROKO, know how to do that,” stated Faux from Canal+.
“We want her to bring that to French speaking Africa. Because we need more African content and we need the industry to develop in French speaking Africa.”
Faux wouldn’t disclose the acquisition value however confirmed there’s a money element of the deal. “This is key for Jason…to developing the VOD aspects of IROKO,” he stated.
Under the deal, ROK will proceed to create distinctive content material for IROKOtv, ROK’s 4 present channels—three on DSTV and ROK Sky within the UK—in addition to Canal+’s Africa and international channels.
The potential to achieve a bigger community of African shoppers on the continent and internationally is one other acquisition play for Canal+. Nollywood on-line content material has confirmed the power to seek out demand anyplace Africans are, together with diaspora populations overseas. IROKOtv’s top-three streaming international locations are Nigeria, the US, and the UK, in line with an organization spokesperson.
“We’ll now be able to do things in English speaking and French speaking African markets…and gain access to an advertising market where we believe there’s huge potential for growth,” stated Faux.
The ROK acquisition shouldn’t be the Canal+ Group’s first collaboration with IROKOtv. The media firm joined a $19 million Series E funding in 2016, that additionally noticed Canal+ and IROKO launch a French VOD channel. This was shortly after Netflix introduced it could go reside in Africa, although with little authentic African content material. Netflix has since began to fee movie content material from Nigeria.
VOD tech startups, comparable to IROKOtv, have labored to take African movie on-line, the place it may be higher distributed and monetized. That’s change into much less of a tough street, given the continent’s bettering cellular and web penetration paired with higher bandwidth and falling information prices. There has been some attribution and loss. In 2017, Y-Combinator-backed French…
