Western streaming and video hosting service industry has long been criticized for its disconnection with the way Africans enjoy watching their indigenous movies and tv-series, but there are players who try to show that the underlying streaming technology can solve some of our most pressing challenges in today’s society — especially in regions where basic infrastructure is lacking.
Onokiti, a Warri-based startup that is part of Onokiti Media House Ltd, has developed a web-based platform for renting indigenous African movies and tv-shows. Speaking with Instablog in an interview, Onokiti’s founder, Emmanuel Onokiti, suggested that there’s a big demand for digital indigenous Nigerian movies rentals globally due to the difficulty of accessing nostalgia movies and tv-shows.
“Western streaming services prides themselves on the fact that they brought modernity and international standards to the modern Nollywood. What the foreign streaming services don’t know is the fact that most Nigerians all over the world are nostalgic to the good-old Nollywood movies and tv-shows which is not available on their streaming services because it doesn’t meet the international film making standards the western media sets, but that is exactly how we prefer our movies.
If it gets too good to ignore, they would ask the copyright owners for the remake to be made to the western storytelling and filmmaking standards. That singular nature of Western standard makes them boring and unappealing to the ordinary Nigerians,” Emmanuel Onokiti said.
In 2020, the founder, who is an internet entrepreneur, started conducting series of surveys online. By 2023, the surveys had reached more than 10,000,000 Nigerians worldwide with 87 percent saying they would pay to be able to rent old Nollywood high quality streams online.
“Just like me, since people couldn’t find a very simple tool to use, I just decided, you know what? Imma build this thing,” he said. “So this was late 2023. We built it out in three months. We demoed it. We tested it for our own viewing experience. It worked fine. I said, yeah, we’re in business.”
“In Nigeria, in Africa, [streams] needs to be a utility that people can actually see and use and solve their problems and bring back good-old shared family entertainment memories,” Onokiti added.
The part where internet plays a key role is storage. To start, studios gives us copies of their originals and of course the copyright to upload their movies and tv-shows on our digital rental and streaming platforms, with most of the generated rental fees going to the copyright owners and just a fraction commission for our platform listing fees. upon which Onokiti automatically make available for download the digital copies of the movies for each and every users at a flat rate of ₦100 per rental which will be available for 90 days on for reviewing at no additional charge to the user.
Onokiti, which means “HERO” in Urhobo (Delta state Nigeria), is run by Emmanuel Onokiti as a one-man, bootstrapped startup to this day with help from contract developers. It offers its platform to internet users worldwide for a flat rental rate of ₦100 but takes a cut from the rental fees it charge users. It’s in the final stages of taking over Nollywood consumer’s service platform as it’s in talks with major movie houses across the country, according to the founder.
