Iflix, the world’s leading Subscription Video on Demand (SVoD) service for emerging markets, announced the launch of its revolutionary service in Nigeria last Thursday at their offices famously known as “The Playground”.
The online video streaming platform which boasts of partnerships with over 220 studios and distributors allows users have access to international, regional and local content which ranges from Asian, European, American and African movies, TV shows, Documentaries and cartoons for as low as ₦799 monthly or an annual subscription at the rate of ₦6,392.
Speaking at the launch, Ngozi Madueke-Dozie, country manager, said the subscription service is targeted at the mass market.
‘We are excited to launch Iflix in Nigeria, we have a lot to offer from our wide range of movie selection from around the globe’, said Ngozi Madueke-Dozie.
She said, “The SVoD will be characterised by local contents that the Nigerian audience can relate with. We are excited to launch Iflix in Nigeria because we have a lot to offer from our wide range of movie selection from around the globe.
“We are especially thrilled to launch Iflix here because it offers affordability, variety, and convenience by giving our users an amazing selection of the best TV shows and movies from all over the world, to stream or download on any device of their choice for less than N800.
"You can watch 20 minutes of video content with 33MB of data so that means you can watch whole shows and movies without exhausting too much data in the process.”
Madueke-Dozie further said that the contents to be supplied by Iflix would meet up with local and global censorship.
But for this innovative company, it has not always been easy being Iflix. When you run a business called iflix that streams movies and box-sets into homes from Iraq to Indonesia, being known as the “Netflix of emerging markets” is inevitable. But it is an inevitability that causes co-founder and chief executive Mark Britt to bristle. Rather, he prefers to highlight the similarities to Spotify — content on both the music streaming service and iflix is curated by celebrities and aficionados.
Certainly the battles facing Mr Britt, an Australian based in Kuala Lumpur, in building the two-year-old company are far removed from those faced by his opposite number at Netflix. Reed Hastings never had to work out a way of collecting money without credit cards, or to fret about data servers — actual physical boxes holding 170 terabytes of House of Cards et al — being stranded at ports.
And Netflix makes money. Iflix, valued at about $600m and backed by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV and Liberty Global, is generating annual sales of $100m. “Are we making revenues? Absolutely. Are we making money? No,” says Mr Britt, speaking in Hong Kong at the Rise technology conference last month.
Price and local content is iflix’s competitive edge on Netflix, argues Mr Britt. Yet building the first emerging market video platform has entailed some unconventional methods. By way of market research Mr Britt, a lawyer by training, talked to stores selling pirated DVDs, assuming they would know what was hot.
Iflix launched in Nigeria last week.
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