107 karma · joined March 23, 2015
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.
This is how I dealt with this question : The racism question is at heart of the building of Afrostream.
You need some contexts here. As I say (a lot) : We are French. French Television and movies are basically, how could I say that in a politically correct way, : white.
(disclaimer : my father is a black man with indian origin, from the Island of the Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, my mother is white from Brittany in France, I was born in Brittany)
We have not a lot of black heroes in our French movies. Correction : we have zero (except Omar Sy). We don't deal well with race in France, in a sense that we can't say we have an established racism, but a lot of small discriminations.
Tonjé and I are media guys. Tonjé wrote scenario, produce shows, directed a theater. The problem we see is that we don't have positive heroes. Basically : why could we not have a black James Bond ?
Our answer is Afrostream : to represent African descents in a positive way, in all their diversities (because, yes, black culture does not exist).
South African movies are definitely in our radar. I loved "Zulu" movie (I am sort of movie geek too), We will look at Egyptian movies too, because, why not.
We intend to have all of the diversities of the culture from African descents. African American movies are popular and will be on Afrostream. Nollywood, the movies from Nigeria, will be there too. We did and will do a big work of curation to unite the best of the African Diaspora. Because our goals are not just to show some movies on your smartphone, but to make learn about some culturees which are sometimes just ignored today. We just started with what we know more : West indies diaspora, West African Diaspora (Tonjé has some origins from Cameroon), African American movies (because, hey, who doesn't watch a good american movie in the world. that's our pop culture everywhere)
Let's face it : Netflix could do that, but they have one year to catch up, fight is on
We, Afrostream, have a bigger house to fill ;)
I am Ludovic, cofounder and CTO of Afrostream. You are right the "African culture" in two words, doesn't exist in fact.There are a lot of different cultures in Africa. Do you know that Nigeria is the second or third producers of movies and series (behind India, and sometimes, USA :) ) Ghana is very productive too. West Africa (Senegal, Mali, Cameroon, Ivroy Coast...) have some interested movies too. Our goal is to show the difference, and to spread the word about these cultures.
To answer to your question : Yes absolutely, we are here in part of diversity. I thought 1à secondes about why I am here, and that certainly played a part,
But the second thought I have was this : even if am here because I am "from diversity", that's ok. I know who I am by myself. I want Afrostream to be big, that's my only goal. And I am at Y Combinator, is that not the place to be big ?
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.
Where do you live in Africa exactly ?
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