Streaming War Heating Up In Nigeria – Who Serves The Best Movies?
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Christina Ngene
I am a movie enthusiast with a passion for writing and a desire to see the African movie industries grow. I try to use my skills as an artist to cheer for Nollywood by writing for NollyMania. • Syndicate Correspondent
The streaming companies operating in Nigeria are fired up and are growing in number. People are only able to subscribe or stream movies on one site at a time and that is not specific to Nigeria. So how does streaming services get ahead?
Is it possible to get people in Nigeria to subscribe to more than one streaming service? Or where do you think consumers have or will place their loyalty – Amazon Prime, Netflix, IRokoTV, Demand Africa or ShowMax?
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We did research and found that winning the fight may be subject to content control. For any streaming service to succeed in this rivalry they will have to provide movies and content that can attract more people in Nigeria.
The Showmax Move
Due to certain concerns about losing customers to streamers, Multichoice, who had only offered Nigeria cable service recently made a quick move on Nigeria. The company launched its streaming site, Showmax in the country in July.
Showmax contents include those exclusive to HBO like ‘Game of Thrones’. HBO services are not available in Africa, and for long people have longed to access these shows. So this move is a plus which will also be supplemented with other unique plans set out for the country in this quest to conquer.
The streaming service plans to partner with local mobile network providers in Nigeria. With this, they will be able to offer data and subscription fees at a reduced rate just as they did in South Africa and Kenya.
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This will surely pose a threat to streaming sites available in Nigeria, but if we must say, they will also oppress other cable television services.
What’s our take on streaming movies in Nigeria?
Each streaming service has exclusive titles, however, Netflix which used the have some the best ones, is slowly losing some good titles. Amazon, just like Netflix has too few Nigerian movies. But most people in Nigeria subscribe to foreign streaming services for foreign movies anyway.
IRokoTv is best at providing Nigerian movies rather than foreign movies. Demand Africa has a good number of African movies in their catalogue. ShowMax offers first-time users a 14-day free trial. This is less than the 30-day free trial that Netflix, Amazon Prime and other services offer. So each of them also has limitation and we can hardly choose which service to settle for.
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