IROKO Partners

Last updated
iROKO Partners
Type of business Private
Founded Lagos, Lagos State, Nigeria
No. of locationsLagos, London, New York City
Founder(s) Jason Njoku
IndustryInternet video and audio
Products iROKOtv, iROKING, NollywoodLove, YorubaLove & iROKtv
Employees110
URL http://www.irokopartners.com

iROKO Partners is an online media distribution company focused on the Nigerian entertainment industry. [1] The company was established in September 2010 and is headquartered in Lagos, with a branch in London, United Kingdom. The company is led by its co-founders Jason Njoku (CEO) and Bastian Gotter along with major investor Nazar Yasin. iROKO Partners offers a range of online media products including its movie streaming website named IROKOtv focused on Nollywood Film productions, and 'iROKING', a Nigerian music streaming platform. [2] Other web brands are NollywoodLove and YorubaLove which operate on the YouTube video platform. [3]

Contents

History

iROKO Partners was founded in 2010 in London, England by Jason Njoku and Bastian Gotter. [4] The Idea was born out of the high and rapidly growing demand for Nollywood films. iROKO partners initially set out to rid both the internet and the industry from the vast amount of piracy which was crippling the industry; once established, the organization birthed Nollywoodlove and Yorubalove, which obtained a dominant share of local YouTube views in 2011. [3] Just four months into his business, Njoku had bought the online rights to 500 movies from 100 one-man production houses. [5]

The company is globally the largest licensor and the leading distributor of Nollywood movies (both English and Yoruba) online. [1] Tiger Global, a hedge fund run by an early investor in Facebook and Zynga, has invested $8 million into the company. [6] In 2012, iROKO Partners was the fastest-growing internet company in Nigeria, was YouTube's biggest African partner, and had distribution deals with Dailymotion, iTunes, Amazon and Vimeo. [6]

iROKING

IROKING is a free Nigerian music streaming service offering streaming of selected music from a range of African labels and artists. [7] Its website platform was launched in December 2011 by iROKO Partners. [8] Music can be browsed by direct searches, artist, album and playlists. The system is currently accessible using Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. [9]

Mobile application

iROKING has mobile applications on the iOS, Android, Windows and Symbian (Nokia) mobile handsets. [10] [11] The application allows access to thousand of the latest Nigerian tracks and stream songs over Wi-Fi or 3G. [7]

The iROKING mobile application's features include:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Black billionaires</span>

Black billionaires are individuals who are of predominantly African ancestry with a net worth of at least US$1 billion.

A music streaming service is a type of online streaming media service that focuses primarily on music, and sometimes other forms of digital audio content such as podcasts. These services are usually subscription-based services allowing users to stream digital copyright restricted songs on-demand from a centralized library provided by the service over the internet. Some services may offer free tiers with limitations, such as advertising and limits on use. They typically incorporate a recommender system to help users discover other songs they may enjoy based on their listening history and other factors, as well as the ability to create and share public playlists with other users. It may also include customized radio or social media platforms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Students Circle Network</span>

Students Circle Network was a global social networking service for university and secondary school students that provided over 10,400 academic courses of various levels from over 200 OpenCourseWare members worldwide, as well as study groups in various academic disciplines with online chat, and social-network games. The platform was an OpenCourseWare consortium member.

Naushad N. Merali, CBS was the founder of the Kenyan mobile service provider Kencell along with French media giant Vivendi. Merali became famous in an almost folk tale for a corporate boardroom manoeuvre that earned him a $20million dollar profit in one hour thanks to pre-emptive rights of his stake in private Telecom company Kencell Kenya in 2004. He attended Highway Secondary School in the suburbs of Nairobi, Kenya. As one of Kenya's leading industrialists, Merali brought commercial development in Kenya for more than 30 years and was constantly expanding his businesses throughout East Africa.

irokotv Web platform

irokotv is a web platform that provides paid-for Nigerian films on-demand. It is one of Africa's first mainstream online movie streaming websites, providing access to over 5,000 Nollywood film titles. irokotv is a part of iROKO Limited, which is one of Africa's entertainment companies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean-Claude Bastos de Morais</span> Swiss-Angolan businessman

Jean-Claude Bastos de Morais is a Swiss-Angolan entrepreneur who has founded and led several businesses over the course of his career. Among these are Quantum Global Group, an international investment group with a particular focus on Africa and Banco Kwanza Invest, Angola's first investment bank.

Kola Aluko is a Nigerian businessman with interests in African infrastructure development and aviation. Formerly based in Nigeria, Aluko was the Co-Chief Officer and an executive director of Atlantic Energy, an indigenous, private upstream oil and gas company, focused on independent exploration and production in Nigeria.

The name TvNolly is a coinage from the words "television" and "Nollywood", the nickname of the movie industry in Nigeria.

Rok Studios is a Nigerian film production company. Its production studios is based in Anthony Village, Lagos. The company was founded in August 2013 by Mary Remmy Njoku. In addition to its numerous films, Rok Studios has produced over 12 TV series.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hotels.ng</span> Nigerian travel websites

Hotels.ng is a Nigerian online hotels booking agency which was launched in 2013. The platform was founded by Mark Essien who hails from Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria and claims to list over 7,138 hotels from 320 cities in Nigeria.

Jim James Ovia is a Nigerian businessman and author. He is the founder of Zenith Bank, which he founded in 1990, and is now the country's most profitable bank.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jason Njoku</span> British entrepreneur (born 1980)

Jason Chukwuma Njoku is a British businessman. He is the co-founder and CEO of iROKOtv, a video-on-demand service for Nigerian movies.

ibakatv

ibakatv is a Video on demand platform for Nollywood movies; it has over 15,000 hours of movie and TV content streamed on-demand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Njoku</span> Nigerian actress (born 1985)

Mary Remmy Njoku(born 20 March 1985) is a Nigerian actress, producer, content creator and founder of the ROK TV Channels and CEO of ROK Studios, which she founded in 2013. With a catalogue of over three thousand (3000) hours of original content produced, that includes movies and TV series, ROK has in a short span become a leading producer of family friendly content and entertainment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Ugwu</span> British music industry executive

Michael Ugwu is a British music industry executive, investor and entrepreneur in Nigeria's music and entertainment industry. He was formerly the General Manager of Sony Music Entertainment, West Africa. He is the founder and CEO of Freeme Digital. Prior to this, Ugwu was the CEO of iROKING Ltd

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Swvl</span> Ridesharing company based in Dubai

Swvl Holdings Corp. is an Dubai-based provider of tech-enabled mass transit solutions, offering intercity, intracity, B2B and B2G transportation products and services. Swvl operates in 135 cities in 20 countries across Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia. The company went public in March 2022 and is traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker SWVL.

Terragon Group Ltd is a Nigerian tech based company that uses data and analytics to help companies market their products in Africa. The company was founded in 2009 by Elo Umeh and Ayodeji Balogun and is headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria with operations in Kenya, Ghana, South Africa and India.

Shola Akinlade is a Nigerian software engineer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Paystack, the company that he founded with Ezra Olubi. Paystack was acquired by Stripe in 2020 for $200m.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paystack</span> Nigerian financial technology company

Paystack is a Nigerian financial technology company that offers payment processing services to businesses and was acquired by Irish-American financial services company Stripe for $200M in 2020. Its headquarters is located in Lagos, Nigeria.

The Pan African Tobacco Group (PTG) is a multinational tobacco company operating in Africa and the Near East.

References

  1. 1 2 "Tiger Global in $8m Iroko deal". Private Equity Africa. 2012-04-05. Archived from the original on 2012-04-14. Retrieved 2012-04-28.
  2. ↑ Mfonobong Nsehe (2012-04-18). "Tiger Global Backs Nigerian Internet E Entrepreneur In $8 Million Round". Forbes. Retrieved 2012-04-28.[ dead link ]
  3. 1 2 Mundy, Simon (2011-11-22). "Iroko Partners: Demand proves insatiable for Nollywood on the net". FT.com. Retrieved 2012-04-28.
  4. ↑ Mfonobong Nsehe (2012-04-18). "Nigerian Internet Entrepreneur Takes Nollywood To The World". Forbes. Retrieved 2012-04-28.
  5. ↑ "You Think Hollywood Is Rough? Welcome to the Chaos, Excitement and Danger of Nollywood". TechCrunch. 2011-05-14. Retrieved 2012-04-28.
  6. 1 2 White, Garry (6 April 2012). "Facebook investor Tiger Global takes stake in Nollywood film distributor". The Telegraph. Retrieved 2012-04-28.
  7. 1 2 Mfonobong Nsehe (2012-04-18). "Tiger Global Backs Nigerian Internet Entrepreneur In $8 Million Round". Forbes. Retrieved 2012-06-03.
  8. ↑ Brown, Ann (2012-04-27). "Jason Njoku Taking The West African Tech World By Storm | The Network Journal". Tnj.com. Archived from the original on 2012-06-08. Retrieved 2012-06-03.
  9. ↑ Anibe Agamah. "iROKING, The New Home Of Nigerian Music Officially Launches". TechLoy. Archived from the original on 2012-06-07. Retrieved 2012-06-03.
  10. 1 2 Anibe Agamah. "iROKING Music App Comes To The Windows Phone (SCREENSHOTS)". TechLoy. Archived from the original on 2012-05-30. Retrieved 2012-06-03.
  11. ↑ Anibe Agamah. "iROKING Android App Launches On The Google Play (BETA)". TechLoy. Retrieved 2012-06-03.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.