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Comment by Tonje | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm Tonjé BAKANG, founder and CEO I would be happy to answer all your questions.

Hi Tonjé,

This is a great idea, but how do you protect yourself from Netflix and Amazon simply deciding to eat your category? It seems like as the 800 pound gorillas in the market, there's nothing preventing them from simply beefing up their catalogs and adding some categories to do the same thing.

FWIW, Amazon does offer Middle of Nowhere (the film in the article screenshot) for rental (no free streaming with Prime) and the "Customers Who Watched This Item Also Watched" is all African-American films as well. That said, it's not clear how deep their catalog goes, and they don't actually have an African-(American) category one can browse.

(Also, why did you write your last name in ALL CAPS? I've seen people do this before, but I've never understood what the convention is trying to achieve).

Don't mean to take away from the thread (I love what Tonjé and Ludovic are doing here and they're great guys!) but I also wondered about that last parenthetical question as well with some of my friends from France.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but in France, it is common, but not necessary, to write your last name before your first name in many situations. And secondly, many people also have last names that are also first names so to avoid confusion and awkwardness it's denoted in all caps.

My favorite is in some Latin American cultures where if you have the name A B C, then B is the last name (father's B) while C is the secondary last name (mother's B). Many who move to the US take up A B as their naming structure due to so many Americans treating B as the middle name.

It makes me want to design all websites to have a single name field with 'Name as you want it to appear' (and a legal full name field if needed within the given domain). I've heard global addresses are even harder to account for.

You've probably seen these lists, but in case you haven't, I think they're great:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

And, of course, there's the niche but real case of people who only have a single name. For example, at a previous job, I once worked with a man whose legal name was just "Steel".

And the majority of Indonesians, who if pressed just reuse their name as last name. At least traditionally, not sure if gov is requiring last names.

You are right. And just in case, the full name of Tonjé is Tonjé Bakang Tonje, so he doesn't mean to have a CAP problem (And I know his computer is aging not well :) but I think it was just to be clear with his full name.

Call him Tonjé (pronounce Tonjay), though, he will always answer you with a smile :)

CrunchyRoll seems to be doing fine in their niche, despite the 800lb gorillas in the neighborhood.

it might be easier for the gorillas to just let them grow, spend the time rounding up and acquiring all the rights, and then buying out the smaller company.

This is an amazing idea. My parents watch Korean (or Asian in general) drama shows all the time, that shit isn't available in Sweden or Netflix.

Nothing that says they won't enjoy content from Africa! I hope you add subtitle support for multiple languages, and make it community driven.

to add subtitles in many languages and dialect is definitely in our plans :)

Are there any plans to get into content production? There are a lot of languages that really lack a lot of natively produced video content (Pulaar, Malinke, etc).

IMO, that's the only way I can see for you to protect yourself from your niche being simply eaten by Netflix et al.

Great feedback :) languages and dialects are a part of our strategy.

We have other ways to protect yourself from Netflix, though, but we can't reveal all our moves at once :)

Hi! All the best for this!

One small question, why is the website in french? I think this product can have global audience, even better no?

Hey, I am Ludovic and cofounder and CTO of Afrostream

At first yes we are French (with baguette and beret and all that stuff), and we know very well the European and African Market in the french spoken countries in this area. So we will start with the market we know well first. But we have a tremendous demand from other countries which send us a lot of messages.

I am not affiliated with Afrostream, but they currently serve only French speaking countries (France, Belgium, Switzerland in Europe and Senegal and Ivory in Africa). My guess is that the founders are from Senegal or Ivory and want to tackle their local market first.

> One small question, why is the website in french?

Have a look at how many French-speaking countries there are in Africa.

French is the lingua franca, after all. :)

;)

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