Better than Netflix

Hey, Sheriff here 👋 

Africa is famous for co-opting tech to suit its tastes. We turned SIM cards into wallets. And we turned roadside kiosks into tiny banks.

Now, we’re doing the same to movie streaming.

But before I show you how it’s happening, I have something to ask…

Now, on to this week’s story….

There’s a free streaming platform that’s used by over 180 million people in Africa.

It has more African movies than Netflix, Showmax, and Prime Video combined.

And it wasn’t even built for movies.

It was built for people to share videos online.

But Africans are building a thriving movie industry on top of it.

You might have guessed it.

It’s YouTube, and it’s quietly become Africa’s biggest movie screen. 

But to make sense of how we got here, we need to ask…

What did the old movie screens look like?

Africa got its first cinema in 1896 in Egypt, six months after the first-ever film screening.

By the 1920s, more film houses had popped up in Dakar, Lagos, and Johannesburg.

Looking back, it’s easy to think we’d become a cinema-going continent. 

But that never happened.

Why? Because cinemas weren't accessible.

• The majority of cinemas were in the big cities, but most people lived in rural areas.

• They mostly aired European films at a time when most people spoke local languages.

• And cinemas were gate-kept, so poorly-funded filmmakers couldn’t get their films in.

Today, it’s not too different. 

Cinemas in Africa are few and far between. 

In 2022, Nigeria only had 60 theatres, all in big cities. Kenya has just 14 theatres.

The UK, on the other hand, has 886.

So if cinemas never caught on, what did?

Two words: Home Videos.

See, in the 1980s, two pieces of technology had become quite popular in Africa:

• TVs, which were being used to watch broadcast news and soap operas.

• And VHS players, which could play recorded videotapes.

The local filmmakers saw an opportunity here. 

Instead of fighting their way into cinemas, they started shooting straight for TV.

They made quick movies on tiny budgets, then sold them everywhere they could.

When VHS went out of fashion, they moved to DVDs.

The stories were simple. Relatable. And wildly popular.

Living in Bondage, one of Nigeria’s classic films, was shot on a budget of ₦150,000 ($15,000 back then).

It went viral, reportedly selling 750,000 copies at ₦300 ($30) a piece. 

That’s ₦225 million total (roughly $22 million). It was the first massive success for the home video economy.

And Nigeria was ground zero for this trend.

By the 2000s, Nigeria was churning out so many movies, it had become the world’s second-largest film producer by volume.

For the first time, film became more accessible in Africa.

This proved something powerful; you don’t need cinemas to have a movie industry. All you need is a screen.

And that insight kicked off a new race.

The battle for a billion eyeballs

Over the last 20 years, there’s been a silent war for attention in African TV. 

It started with DStv, Multichoice’s first cable TV product.

DStv brought 24/7 movie access into African homes. But it was expensive.

To get movie access, you had to buy a satellite disc and a decoder.

Then you’d set it up and pay a monthly subscription—sometimes as high as $50 (in the early 2000s) a month.

So, Cable TV stayed inaccessible.

In 2010, a discount wave happened.

GoTV (also a MultiChoice product) and StarTimes came on the scene for as little as N2,500 ($5) a month.

And you didn’t need a dish to set it up.

But they were just new wrappers on an old problem. They had a limited catalogue, updated movies slowly, and users couldn’t control what they watched.

Then came mobile streaming.

First with IrokoTV, then Showmax, then Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

They took the 24/7 access of Cable TV and combined it with the rewatch value of home videos.

But they also came with familiar problems:

• They were subscription-based, so many people found them unaffordable.

• They focused on making local originals, many of which get pirated by other people for free.

• And more home videos were being made than they could keep up with.

Eventually, the cracks showed: high expenses and low subscriber count.

IrokoTV exited Nigeria despite spending 13 years building in it.

Netflix and Showmax, the continent’s biggest streaming apps, have less than 4 million subscribers combined on the continent.

And Amazon Prime Video exited Nigeria one year after it entered the market.

But while these platforms slowly unravelled, another one was quietly growing in dominance.

Enter: YouTube

In 2013, Mark Angel was an unknown filmmaker in Nigeria who had a hard time finding gigs.

He’d tried breaking into the Nollywood scene with no success. 

So he thought: why not shoot funny skits and post them online?

Content creators in the US had started this trend with Vine skits.

They were short, funny, and could be rewatched many times.

So, he recruited some friends, made a few videos, and started posting on YouTube - a more familiar platform for Nigerians.

His videos were funny and relatable. And he called his channel: Mark Angel Comedy.

And they quickly went viral.

In 2017, the channel crossed a million subscribers. 

By 2020, Mark Angel was making $300,000 a month from YouTube.

Today, he’s at 9.5 million subscribers.

That’s more than all the streaming platforms in Africa combined.

Mark Angel’s success sparked a new wave of local content creators.

These filmmakers shot videos for the internet instead of TV screens.

And YouTube became a career path for them.

Today, the top content creators in Africa print money:

• Kwadwo Sheldon, a Ghanaian YouTuber, makes $10,000 a month shooting funny videos.

• Broda Shaggi, a Nigerian comedian, makes over $40,000 a month.

• Kabza De Small, a South African YouTuber, makes $45,000 a month.
  

Africa’s creator economy is currently worth $5 billion. But it’s projected to grow 6x by 2030, reaching $30 billion.

Things don’t grow so fast so often. And that growth gave birth to a new insight.

All along, it was never about home videos.

People didn’t care if a video was “cinema-quality” or a home video.

They just wanted to be entertained.

Interestingly, legacy filmmakers caught on to this and started shooting movies for YouTube.

They cut out premieres and shiny actors and focused on telling fun stories instead.

Today, there are entire movie series launched and housed on YouTube.

And they get millions of views within days of release.

One of them, Aiyetoro Town, is a spin-off series of a popular Nigerian TV show that started six years ago.

But it was launched entirely on YouTube.

Today, it averages 1.5 million views per episode.

When you think about it, it makes sense:

• Filmmakers don’t need cable TV to get watched. They can just upload their videos.

• Viewers don’t need to pay a subscription; YouTube is free.

• And if anyone pirates a film, they get flagged for piracy, and YouTube takes it down.

Thanks to tech, filmmakers in Nigeria are fixing three problems in one fell swoop: piracy, access, and monetisation.

In Africa, YouTube is creating…

A New Movie Economy

YouTube’s impact on the African movie scene is in what it’s made possible for filmmakers.

It helped bring the home video economy online.

And now, it’s opening up new parts of the economy with it.

Like filming locations.

Some producers now rent out Airbnbs for a week to shoot multiple movies at once.

And it’s why, in places like Lagos, apartment listings are on the rise.

It’s also creating jobs. Scriptwriters now get short-term gigs that pay around $100 for four to five days.

Since these movies have such massive audiences, local businesses now sponsor films on YouTube in exchange for ads.

Angel investors fund films for healthy returns.

And actors with little fame can now charge higher for shorter stints because the money makes sense.

Omoni Oboli, one of Nigeria’s most popular actresses, has a YouTube channel that was launched just a year ago.

In March, she released a movie, Love in Every Word. It crossed a million views in 24 hours.

By the third day, it crossed five million.

YouTube is Africa’s biggest and most powerful streaming platform by far.

It’s changing how movies are made in Africa, and carrying the creator economy along with it.

What do you think about YouTube’s rise as a streaming platform in Africa?

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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