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Tag: IROKOtv

  • Mauritius firm secures court order to freeze IROKOtv CEO Jason Njoku’s accounts over debt crisis

    Mauritius firm secures court order to freeze IROKOtv CEO Jason Njoku’s accounts over debt crisis

    The Lagos Division of the Federal High Court has issued an interim order to freeze bank accounts linked to IROKOtv CEO Jason Njoku due to a legal dispute with Cote Ouest Audiovisuel Maurice, an independent audiovisual company based in Mauritius.

     

    The audiovisual company claims that Njoku’s IROKOtv failed to honour licensing agreements for five telenovelas, leading to an unsettled debt of $68,780.

     

    Justice L.A. Okunnu granted the order while ruling on an ex parte motion filed by the Mauritius-based company on 21 March 2024. The dispute concerns an unsettled contract between Cote Ouest Audiovisuel and Njoku’s company.

     

    The claimants stated that they had signed two separate licensing agreements with IROKOtv, allowing it non-exclusive rights to broadcast five telenovelas: Caribbean Flowers, Juanita is Single, Now Generation, Seize the Day, and Hidden Truth. The total value of these agreements was $141,500. However, they allege that Njoku failed to honour the terms, leading to a settlement arrangement requiring payments totalling $68,780 from 7 October 2023 to 7 February 2025.

     

    “A Garnishee Order Nisi is hereby made to the effect that sums of money which stand to the credit of the judgement debtors be and hereby attached to satisfy the judgement debt yet unpaid — the sum of USD 68780…or its equivalent in Naira as well as the administrative costs of these garnishee proceedings,” the order stated.

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    In 2019, IROKOtv, a digital video-on-demand service, announced that it had successfully sold its media assets under the ‘ROK Group’—including ROK Studios, ROK1–3 on DStv/GOtv, and ROK on SKY—to Canal Plus, a subsidiary of the Canal+ Group, which holds a majority stake in Côte Ouest Audiovisuel. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. The acquisition expanded Canal+ Group’s reach in Nigeria and across Africa by adding ROK’s production, content distribution, and publishing arms.

     

    Njoku later clarified that the deal only involved the sale of IROKO Group and that his wife, Mary Njoku, retained her ownership stake.

     

    At the time, there was widespread speculation that IROKOtv had been quietly sold off, with rumours suggesting that Njoku embarked on a lavish international lifestyle that disrupted the company’s operations.

    IROKOtv’s business struggles raise questions

    Amid the legal battle, speculation continues regarding IROKOtv’s financial health, with Njoku previously denying claims that the company is struggling. He, instead,  claimed that IROKOtv was undergoing a necessary transformation.

    Read also: IROKOtv focuses on dollar-paying users, denies shutdown reports

    “Irokotv dead? We can all agree that 2023 has been a nightmare. For me, it’s been unusually brutal as I have spent considerable time dealing with debt restructuring, cost reductions and completing the three-year turnaround of Iroko,” Mr Njoku tweeted.

     

     

  • IROKOtv focuses on dollar-paying users, denies shutdown reports

    IROKOtv focuses on dollar-paying users, denies shutdown reports

    IROKOtv, a Nigerian-owned, African streaming platform that has been operational for twelve years, has denied that it has ceased business activities after its website was taken offline and its mobile app was removed from the app stores of both Apple and Android. 

    As a result of this disappearance, as well as a general lack of communication across the company’s many social media handles, rumours began to circulate that the service was about to be discontinued.

    IROKOtv’s Chief Executive Officer, Jason Njoku, responded to the reports of a shutdown by stating that the services provided by the company fell unavailable because of an ongoing migration.

    “We’ve been migrating platforms for the last few weeks, so the site has been in maintenance mode,” he said.

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    IROKOtv’s new focus

    iroko tv current prices

    IROKOtv has been operating for the past ten years using a software stack that was developed for an African audience with certain broadband setup requirements. Njoku noted that the company is now altering its focus.

    “We had to hard pivot away from Africa, which rendered our existing product and platform obsolete. It was harder than expected to untangle everything after 10+ years of building for Nigeria first,” he said.

    According to him, the move is almost finished, and he explains that an engineering pivot was required to make sure that IROKOtv will be accessible on smart TVs, which is a rapidly expanding market area for streaming providers. He anticipates that the streaming platform will become available as soon as this week, and the business anticipates going live on smart TVs such as Roku, LG, and Samsung before the end of the year. He believes that this week would be the earliest that the platform will be available.

    IROKOtv is a member of one of the earliest groups of African technology firms that were founded in the early 2010s. At that time, African businesspeople and investors were placing their first bets on the continent’s various digital services, such as online shopping and video streaming. IROKOtv, which is financed by Tiger Global, has managed to thrive although several of its streaming competitors have failed while other firms from this era have struggled.

     

    More details

    Over the course of the past few years, Njoku has provided numerous explanations as to why IROKOtv has been forced to undergo a difficult transition away from its African roots in order to stay in business. The widespread adoption of streaming services across the continent continues to be hampered by low-income levels and the high cost of affordable internet connectivity. As the French media industry increased its focus on the African continent in 2019, it decided to sell its content library as well as its film production arm to Canal+. 

    “[Today], 89% of our revenues for the first nine months of 2023 were outside of Nigeria. With the new Naira devaluations that ultimately makes sense,” Njoku remarked.

    Even while this is not the first time that NJoku’s IROKOtv has discussed the significance of concentrating on the African diaspora, the impending migration of the channel signals a significant wager on the new market that it intends to serve.

  • Former IROKO Co-founder Bastian Gotter, Nets $3.2M Seed For New Venture Bamba

    Former IROKO Co-founder Bastian Gotter, Nets $3.2M Seed For New Venture Bamba

    Bastian Gotter, in 2010, invested about $200,000 into IROKOtv, an African video-on-demand company co-founded by his friend Jason Njoku.

    Gotter, as the CFO, played a vital role in turning IROKO — into a household name in Nigeria’s entertainment and tech scenes — after raising over $30 million from VCs. He exited the media company in 2017 for full-time angel investing and to pursue new projects.

    Gotter’s profile afterward includes a cut in Paystack, Flutterwave, and betPawa, as well as co-founding Spark, an investment entity with Njoku.

    He started a pre-school chain in the United Kingdom and South Africa in 2018. He joined the founding team of Kenyan fintech PawaPay, whose API connects up to 25 telecom providers two years later.

     

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    Gotter is a PawaPay investor and board member, with active and passive roles depending on who’s involved. Gotter, on the other hand, was more of the latter, and in January 2022, he began looking at different mobile money payment opportunities, especially for small businesses. As a result, he founded Bamba with Martin Schramm, mobile-based enterprise software for African micro-merchants that just raised a $3.2 million seed round.

     

    Gotter’s Experience in Birthing Bamba

    After spending time in Kenya (where he had been accustomed to paying with mobile money rather than cash), he discovered that businesses relied heavily on manual bookkeeping and lacked the software to track cash and mobile money transactions.

    “They also recorded stock components and had some form of customer relationship management on WhatsApp. It wasn’t a coherent picture and was just a big mess,” Gotter said. “And that’s where we ultimately saw an opportunity to launch Bamba.”

    In Sub-Saharan Africa, micro, small, and medium-sized firms account for 90% of all businesses. Sabi Cash, Bumpa, Kippa, and OZÉ are new upstarts in West Africa that provide digital bookkeeping services for a small number of them. Bamba is a matching solution for Kenyan and East African merchants, who accepted more than $200 billion in mobile money payments last year.

    The platform includes enterprise management software and an Android application that provides micro-merchants the tools to run their businesses. Its features include managing customers, recording stock levels, and receiving and making payments.

    “Merchants can record what cash and mobile money transactions they collect and their cash and mobile money payouts. And through that initial record keeping, we have an entry point into the business,” said Gotter, who also mentioned that Bamba wants to improve cash collection for merchants primarily done via USSD and M-Pesa pay bill numbers at point-of-sale. 

     

    Read Also : MoMo PBS Limited Begins Operations in Nigeria

     

    “We have the inventory management components that tie in with how many and which goods are sold. Then the payments bit ultimately resulting in a point of sale type devices like Square or Yoco that lets you get a clearer picture of your business and your activities.”

     

    Iterating and Developing The Bamba Products

    Lack of credit is a thorn in the flesh for merchants worldwide; this is especially true in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the credit gap for small businesses exceeds $300 billion. This is one area where bookkeeping digitalization appears to be highly beneficial to merchants. Despite their diverse entry points into the market, startups in this field eventually converge on that single point. Bamba’s solution, which combines inventory, CRM, and payments, will enable it to provide cash advances against merchants’ future cash flow.

    “These are businesses that have previously not been lent to as their credit score was insufficient to get the appropriate loans. But since we have a pretty accurate picture of our customers in terms of its cash and mobile money receivables, we can make accurate lending decisions to them in a way not done before,” the CEO stated.

    Bamba, which is five-month-old, is currently in stealth mode and is yet to launch. Gotter said the startup is testing its platform with 30 merchants. Its revenue will come from two streams: a small payment fee paid by merchants and interests from its lending/cash advance product.

    “We’re very deep in the research phase and quick iteration cycle to figure out the initial product we want to launch at a greater scale in 12 markets,” said Gotter.

    This seed funding, according to the CEO, is integral to speeding up this process of acquiring more users and scaling the engineering team behind the product. Berlin and San Francisco-based 468 Capital led the round, while Presight Ventures and Jigsaw VC participated alongside angel investors such as Laurin Hainy of FairMoney and Leonard Stiegler of Pulse.