This deal, announced just days after the firm inked a similar deal with StartTimes means Nollywood wil be available in Africa and out of Africa to millions of viewers worldwide. We won’t be suprised to see Nollywood crossing boundaries to some of the countries like Asia. Jason Njoku said in a blog post, “Obviously with 57m subscribers globally, working with Netflix is a great first step to widening or at least improving the visibility of Nollywood. Which again is super important to us at IROKO.” The deal was signed last year December. “After months of negotiations, we signed a deal with Netflix to support their launch of a dedicated African section. We reached out to our producer network and facilitated the creation of the African section. This is something I yearned for with YouTube so many years ago, and was ultimately the reason I created IROKOtv,” Jason added. Just days ago, NollyLand, a similar VOD startup based in the US, announced it had integrated its service to Roku and also launched a Chromecast app. Of course Netflix is huge and IROKO comes out as the winnerman. If you are asking why Netflix.com/Africa is not live yet, Njoku says there are processes to follow. The firm is “still trying to establish the right price, access (downloads vs streaming) and content mix to drive this mandate”.
