Subscription video on demand service, iROKOtv, has turned its sight to providing subscription mobile entertainment content to French-speaking African countries.
The company in partnership with Canal+ group, a PayTV provider in Francophone Africa, will launch an Android app with download functionality that lists titles from the 23 French-speaking African countries.
According to a statement from Canal +, “the service will be aimed at building a new mobile-only subscriber base across Francophone Africa”.
As is par for big announcements like this from iROKOtv, Jason blogged about the deal. According to him, the first step in executing the partnership will be co-branding a mobile app, then, iROKOtv will spend the coming years curating “some of the best content available in French speaking Africa”.
“Now that Canal+ is close to having two million pay TV households in Africa, our ambition is to widen our audience to those whose mobile is the main entertainment device. iROKO’s original approach integrating popular content production and mobile SVOD perfectly matches our group’s entertainment vision,” Jacques du Puy, President of Canal+ Overseas, said.
As part of the deal, iROKOtv will have a new office in Abidjan, capital of Cote d’Ivoire, in addition to its Lagos, London, New York and Johannesburg offices.
Jason first hinted at this partnership last week in a post marking iROKOtv’s 4th anniversary, claiming the deal – a linear TV deal – would eclipse its subscription business revenue till 2020.
“iROKO Global closed the biggest deal in its short history. A deal which actually dwarfs our entire subscription business revenue for 2015. Our consumer business has 110 people working on it. Costs us millions annually in losses. Yet with one client, one deal, Linear revenue until 2020 will eclipse it,” Jason said.
The exact size of the deal is undisclosed.
Both Canal + and iROKOtv have previously worked through content distribution deals for linear TV channels such as Nollywood TV. The partnership is the latest in a stream of partnerships that iROKOtv has locked down this year alone. A deal with Netflix, Lebara, and Star Times are a few of the highlights.
