Hey,
Thank you for the feedback :)
I am Ludovic, Cofounder and CTO of Afrostream.
Netflix is big, that's sure, but as said in the thread, Netflix is like the big Three (ABC, NBC, CBS), and target the largest audience possible. And I am an avid client of Netflix too. They have an offer of African-American contents, even some African contents for sure. It's not complete.
We have curated for one year some of the best and unseen African or African-descendant contents. Not only the Festival-sanctioned movies and series but also, the contents which are popular in local markets and that we are bringing to our customers.
Seems to me that is more a segment than a niche, but I like to play a little with the words :)
Our vision here is double :
to propose a large selection of african, african-american movies and tv series, first in France (I am French), and french spoken countries, in Europe and Africa, first. Netflix is not yet in Africa, so we have some technical challenges there, but we will be basically the first.
To propose the new african and african american positive characters to all : on that regards, our customers will not only be black
Do you know Drama Fever : the core of the Drama Fever is Asian contents, they have 3,5 millions active users. 80% of these users are non-Asian.
That's one of our goal : to let know that there is a diversity in movies, and that everybody could watch them with same pleasure
Your analogy breaks down though, because the big three channels could only air one show at a time. Netflix can license (or make) as many shows as they want without hurting their popular appeal.
Basically, if you're successful, there's nothing stopping Netflix from licensing the same shows as you. Since they're Netflix, they'll probably negotiate better content deals, have better recommendations, better mobile apps, more supported devices, etc.
Another danger is that Netflix has experience making their own shows. If your target audience looks enticing enough, Netflix can produce exclusive content to woo them over. They've already started doing this with anime (Knights of Sidonia).
All-in-all, this seems like a really tricky business to be in. I wish you luck.
I understood your point of view. Netflix is better than us now, that's a fact.
I personally don't think Netflix could be exhaustive in every way because the curation work is very important here, to satisfy every segment in the world.
Netflix is not in Africa though,
Drama fever, Crunchyroll, viki.com did well in their segment. And we intend to be the best in ours.
I don't know about the others, but the thing that Crunchyroll does differently than Netflix is that it's a lot more like the Steam of Anime. Prior to Crunchyroll, it was extremely common (still is, I think) for fans to simply download fan-subbed versions of content and the license holders wouldn't see any money until they were able to sign a deal with a distribution company that would later sell a series on disc.
Crunchyroll provides the immediacy of fansubs but with legitimacy and sees that license holders get paid something where they weren't getting paid anything.
Additionally, the type of content that Crunchyroll provides isn't necessarily something Netflix would go after, in that it is released on an episode by episode basis (in line with air dates in Japan) rather than all at once (as is the typical Netflix model) and that there is rarely dubbing (which most, though notably not all, Netflix anime has).
That said, Netflix has been seriously expanding their anime efforts. I really do wonder if Crunchyroll is going to be able to keep growing as Netflix expands its presence more and more.
All that said, the one thing I'm really not sure of is how long Netflix can continue to do more and more licensing deals and original content without increasing its subscription cost. In that respect, I think the iTunes model is a lot more stable (and I'm perfectly happy paying for close-to-airtime delivery I get for the shows I do watch through it).
My only gripe with paying for that content is that the price premium seems to be pretty high on iTunes given that the content has revocable DRM (then again, Apple is more likely to be around in this space for a long time than any of the other current players).
In summary: I think you might be right, but it's definitely a pretty dynamic situation. Hope it goes well!
I want to echo the other reply to this post. Crunchyroll offers its customers a way to view the shows as they are released, which was a big change from how anime was normally consumed. Viki works because of the very strong fan subbing community that it has built. From my point of view the best way to compete with Netflix is to find a niche that is hard for them to fill. It's unlikely that Netflix can get people to sub their shows for free. Netflix wasn't designed with the queue type setup that crunchy roll has, etc.
As far as technical challenges on streaming/hosting in Africa - I remember hearing about Kili (http://kili.io/) on HN a while ago. They do AWS-like infrastructure located in Nairobi, so could make it easy to get started in East Africa. Good luck!
I'm not sure the comparison with Drama Fever (or even Crunchyroll) is fair. There was an enormous market of people looking for Asian content (as evidenced by the fansub scene, and Asian-themed conventions worldwide), which made the bet much safer. An African Drama Fever would probably have to create its market to reach such a stage.
That said, it's a good idea, a big bet, and I sincerely wish you the best.
Hi, just a small question. Is "Intouchables" a film you would carry or does the majority of the cast need to be "African-American" (or Afro-French, Afro-Brazilian, etc etc)?
Intouchables is definitely an Afrostream movie. We want to show some positive characters who are Afro-descendants and it's definitely a movie which shows that
Netflix is big, that's sure, but as said in the thread, Netflix is like the big Three (ABC, NBC, CBS), and target the largest audience possible. And I am an avid client of Netflix too. They have an offer of African-American contents, even some African contents for sure. It's not complete. We have curated for one year some of the best and unseen African or African-descendant contents. Not only the Festival-sanctioned movies and series but also, the contents which are popular in local markets and that we are bringing to our customers. Seems to me that is more a segment than a niche, but I like to play a little with the words :)
Our vision here is double : to propose a large selection of african, african-american movies and tv series, first in France (I am French), and french spoken countries, in Europe and Africa, first. Netflix is not yet in Africa, so we have some technical challenges there, but we will be basically the first.
To propose the new african and african american positive characters to all : on that regards, our customers will not only be black
Do you know Drama Fever : the core of the Drama Fever is Asian contents, they have 3,5 millions active users. 80% of these users are non-Asian.
That's one of our goal : to let know that there is a diversity in movies, and that everybody could watch them with same pleasure