OTT & Mobile Battle in Africa
Andrew Antonopoulos
Senior Solutions Architect at Sony Professional Solutions Europe
OTT and specially SVOD is growing in Africa. Recently big OTT providers such as Netflix, muvi, Showmax, iFlix, MTN and StarTimes launch their service in multiple countries because they are optimistic about the future of streaming service across the continent, driven by high mobile penetration. Mobile distribution is essential for the OTT market in Africa as Simon Murray, Principal Analyst at Digital TV Research, said:?
It is very important to stress the power that mobile operators have over the future of Sub-Saharan African OTT TV and video.
Source: https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2017/06/25/mobile-distribution-essential-for-african-ott-success/
Digital TV Research forecasts 10.12 million SVOD subs by 2022, up from 525,000 at end-2016. South Africa (2.70 million by 2022) will remain the leader, but Nigeria (2.64 million) will be close to taking top slot.
Sub-Saharan African OTT movie and TV episode revenues will reach $1,018 million by 2024 – up from $223 million in 2018.Despite this quintupling of revenues, Africa still has a lot of potential growth in the long-term.
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OTT providers and mobile companies are one side of the OTT story, the other side is the innovation to build backend systems that will support the OTT growth. Recently big Cloud companies announced that they will create Data Centres in South Africa to support new development and probably content distribution. However the main question is, are they going change their prices to match the Africa market reality??
The problem that many OTT providers are facing in Africa, is the cost to maintain a service, the licences and of course the distribution of the content. Big worldwide companies are using Africa as another continent to add into their revenue but the reality is slightly different.?Africa will need local services which understanding the market and are willing to migrate with the local communities.?
The following years we will see new OTT services across Africa and new technologies/innovations as well. Africa's young generation is hungry for these kind of services and definitely will adapt it as long as the government, mobile operators, ISPs are willing to support them.
#OTT #Africa #Mobile