iROKO Partners started in December 2010, when Jason Njoku
couldn’t find any Nollywood movies online for his mother. Having
realised how popular Nollywood was, he thought it inconceivable that
something so popular was so inaccessible. He flew to Lagos, immersed
himself in the hustle and raw capitalism of Alaba Market [where the
business of Nollywood is done], connected with the industry’s producers
and actors and started purchasing the online licences for their movies.
Having negotiated Africa’s first content partnership deal with
YouTube, the company streamed full-length Nollywood movies online, under
the name of Nollywood Love. The Diaspora couldn’t get enough and
Nollywood Love was an overnight success. In January 2012, the company
launched its own movie streaming platform, iROKOtv and reached 500,000
registered users in under 6 months.
In December 2011, iROKO Partners moved into the Nigerian music
scene and iROKING was born. The platform showcases the most awesome West
African singers and manages and monetizes the video YouTube sites for
many of the industry’s top artists.
IROKO Partners is the world’s largest distributor of
African entertainment. Since launching in December 2010, the company has
built a global audience of over 6 million unique users from 178
different countries.
What iROKO Partners does is brutally simple: we buy the online
licences of movies and music directly from producers and recording
artists and stream them online to a global Diaspora audience. In doing
this, iROKO Partners has assembled the world’s largest online library of
awesome African content and has made us West Africa’s fastest growing
Internet company.
African movies, music and messages by Africans for Africans.