The global SVoDs are broadening their horizons in search of new subscribers, as the streaming market becomes saturated in the US and Europe. Along with India, many are seeking growth in Africa, targeting major economies such as Nigeria and South Africa, and commissioning original local content that can also play to international audiences.
“Africa is largely an untapped market,” says Nigerian television pioneer Mosunmola ‘Mo’ Abudu, founder and CEO of EbonyLife Group, who is being celebrated at this month’s Series Mania festival with its Women In Series Award. “There is a plethora of very talented and passionate filmmakers who would like to share their stories.”
Abudu founded EbonyLife as a pan-African TV service in 2013, expanding into content production through a series of related companies including EbonyLife Studios, EbonyLife Films and EbonyLife Media. One of its first success stories was TV series Castle & Castle, a legal drama centring on a pair of successful Nigerian lawyers, which was picked up by Netflix. EbonyLife subsequently signed a multi-title deal with the streamer, the biggest and the first of its kind in Africa, to create two original series, and license films and series to the streamer. Blood Sisters, a thriller set in Lagos about two best friends who commit an accidental murder setting off a series of catastrophic events, starts streaming later this year.
EbonyLife also has a first-look deal with Sony Pictures Television, with which it is co-developing Dahomey Warriors, a series about a mysterious female battalion from a historical West African kingdom; is developing a slate of film and TV projects with Will and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Westbrook Studio; and has teamed with Will Packer Productions to develop an untitled project based on the Bloomberg article ‘The Fall of the Billionaire Gucci Master’. The latter is about an alleged con man from Nigeria who laundered millions while flaunting his activities on Instagram. Most recently, BBC Studios and EbonyLife signed a development deal to produce six-part heist thriller Reclaim.
Further projects in the works include an untitled drama about Queen Nzinga, a 17th-century African warrior queen, starring Curtis ‘50 Cent’ Jackson and Yetide Badaki for Starz and Lionsgate TV, and a futuristic crime drama called Nigeria 2099 for AMC Networks.
Key themes
Abudu says the projects on the production and development slate fall into four different types of TV drama: Afro-history (“true stories, oral histories, myths and legends from the continent’s rich past,” she explains); Afro-futurism (“sci-fi such as Nigeria 2099”); Afropolitan (“focusing on contemporary life in African cities and the extraordinary drama of ordinary lives, as in Castle & Castle”); and Afro-impact (“hard-hitting dramas and current events such as Blood And Sisters”).
“Global audiences have, by and large, not been exposed to African content, made by Africans, so they may not yet demand that which they don’t know,” Abudu suggests.
Abudu was born in London in 1964 and brought up in Nigeria from the age of seven until 11, before returning to the UK where she went to university. Her career began in human resources, leading to work in the Nigerian oil and gas industry. She opened her own HR firm, diversified into the hotel-build business and in 2006 hosted a television show — Moments With Mo, an Oprah Winfrey-like talk show crafted for the local market — before launching EbonyLife.
“More streamers commissioning more work, more studios doing co-production deals and more distribution channels in place will help grow the African film industry,” Abudu says.
Netflix accounts for more than half of Africa’s streaming subscriptions, with 2.7 million subscribers from a total of 4.9 million, as of December 2021. It is ahead of local streamers Showmax, run by South African pay-TV operator MultiChoice, and StarTimes ON, operated by the Chinese pay-TV platform Star Times, as well as Amazon Prime Video. Disney+ is set to launch in South Africa later this year, and in Nigeria in 2023.
Sub-Saharan Africa OTT movie and television series revenue is forecast to surge to $2bn by 2027, more than triple the $623m of 2021, according to a new report by Digital TV Research. South Africa and Nigeria will together account for 56% of the total by 2027.
Digital TV Research forecasts 13.7 million SVoD subscriptions by 2027, up from 4.9 million at the end of 2021. Netflix is forecast to account for 47% of sub-Saharan Africa’s SVoD subscriptions by 2027 and Amazon Prime Video is forecast to have 2.2 million paying subscribers by 2027.
Forging a path
But challenges remain. “Lack of funding, insufficient infrastructure and lack of training” all weigh down on potential growth in Africa, says Constantinos Papavassilopoulos, principal analyst at media consultancy Omdia. Currently, sub-Saharan Africa’s “capacity to produce quality African original content is limited and cannot satisfy the needs of the major OTT platforms”, he says. The real tipping point for the continent may come when these issues are resolved.
Other hurdles include a low addressable user base, economic and political volatility, monopoly and duopoly-controlled markets and currency fluctuations. Pay-TV subscribers in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Uganda, for example, grew at 17% in the 2011-19 period, yet devalued local currencies meant they grew only 5% in US dollar terms in the period, Omdia calculations show. The Nigerian naira suffered a 91% devaluation against the dollar over 2013-19, though the flipside is that the cost of making local productions has become more attractive.
Abudu has already started thinking ahead so she can help meet the expected demand from streamers. She has launched the EbonyLife Creative Academy in Lagos and in London to develop her own talent, and offers training to third parties.
She is keen to grow EbonyLife further. “We are eyeing international expansion,” she says. “As Nigerians and Africans, we should see ourselves as world citizens, and our storytelling and networks should extend to every corner of the globe.”
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