ROK raced to 85% independent market share in Nollywood distribution
In early 2016, I asked the IROKO board for permission to acquire a competing Nollywood PayTV channel group. I had only been in the PayTV game a year or so, but the moment I understood the economics of channel building, was the moment I realised IROKO had a very unfair advantage: Content and the ability to scale. We had been acquiring and curating thousands of pieces of content for years at that point and essentially had more content than we knew what to deal with. Other than AfricaMagic, our library was unrivalled. More importantly, we had already started to own increasingly large amounts of content (via our stake in ROK) or had licensed thousands of hours and were just looking for opportunities to monetise it. The operators' revenues had jumped considerably over a five year period of time to $820k and $154k in Pre tax profits. It was a <10 person team and I really respected them as they ran a tight ship and had...