iROKO‘s film production division, Rok Studios has announced its intention to launch a channel on UK’s Sky TV this month. The new channel is set to launch on Thursday, September 29, 2016, and it’ll be available as a free-to-view for all Sky subscribers (that’s about 10 million homes in the UK).
ROK on Sky will air Rok Studios originals (like Single Ladies, Banks Chronicles and Bloodline) and all programming and scheduling will be done by both Rok teams in Lagos and London.
Rok CEO, Mary Remmy Njoku is pretty excited about this launch. In her words, “I am so happy to finally be able to share the news of this UK Sky channel with Rok fans. We have been working towards this for some time, and now we are launching in just a few weeks – we are all super excited. As a production house, we are obsessed with curating amazing African content and telling African stories our way – and with this next big chapter in the Rok story, we can give millions more people the chance to enjoy our movies and TV series.”
Based in Lagos, Rok Studios launched in 2013 and make both live-action and animated productions. So far, Rok has developed, produced and financed film and TV series for distribution platforms globally.
Talking about this milestone (and his wife’s determination in achieving it) in a blog post, iROKO CEO, Jason Njoku said, “This is really, really a big deal. When she attempted the series, Festac Town whilst 5 months pregnant back in 2013, I knew she had stamina. She pushed herself beyond tears to get that done. At the time, Nollywood didn’t take TV series too seriously. Definitely didn’t invest in it. Fast forward a few years and ROK studios creates some of the top tier series content in Nollywood.”
iROKO is obviously a giant when comes to Nigerian media content distribution. Just last week, they launched IrokoX, a multi-channel network that’ll help Nigerian content creators monetise and distribute their content, and that works on an 80/20 basis (the artistes get the 80).
Rok on Sky’s launch is scheduled to celebrate Nigeria’s 56th Independence Day anniversary (that’s October 1) and as expected, there’ll be a ton of Nollywood actors there.
