The world’s largest distributor of Nigerian entertainment iROKO Partners was last week announced by All Amber — organiser of mobile related events in Africa — as a Gold sponsor of this year’s Mobile Entertainnent Africa event scheduled for Cape Town, South Africa.
This represents the first time that iROKO Partners sponsors an African event.
As YouTube’s largest African partner with over 150 million views in 2011, iROKO is also one of the fastest growing Internet companies in Nigeria and holds more than 5,000 Nollywood titles in its library.
Speaking to HumanIPO, Jessica Hope, who is the Global Communications Officer at iROKO, elaborated on their decision to sponsor. She said: “We decided to sponsor this year’s Mobile Entertainment Africa event because we attended the inaugural event last year and were impressed by the turn out, high calibre of speakers and the fact that there was a genuine buzz and excitement there.”
iROKO has also a music platform, iROKING, which is Africa’s largest distributor of digital music with a catalogue of over 35,000 songs. Across all of its entertainment channels, iROKO Partners says it has seen over 4.5 million unique visits.
Jessica further explained that they will be giving two keynote speeches – one from the CEO of iROKING, their music platform and one from iROKOtv – talking about how they are revolutionising the digital entertainment sphere in Africa.
The other aim is to also get out and meet other tech companies from across the continent who are also pioneers in their areas, according to Hope.
On the question of whether we’ll be seeing iROKO expand its content beyond Nigeria Hope said its something their business development team in Lagos is currently looking into.
“There’s an awful lot of Nollywood content out there, and we have a huge library of movies and music already, but we know that the continent is producing some fantastic content and we want to be able to share that with the African Diaspora,” she said.
Matthew Dawes, Managing Director of All Amber expressed his delight that iROKO Partners has committed to supporting Mobile Entertainment Africa.
He said iROKO’s products are helping to make African entertainment content available to Africans both on the continent and in the Diaspora while simultaneously acting to curb piracy, which is currently a major challenge in the industry. Mobile entertainment is a crucial component of the mobile revolution in Africa and iROKO’s pivotal role in transforming the African entertainment ecosystem is undisputed.
Mobile Entertainment Africa takes place on August 29 and 30 at the 5-star One&Only Hotel in Cape Town.
It will give attendees the opportunity to gain and exchange knowledge surrounding maximising the entertainment opportunities on handheld devices in Africa.
Attendance at the event is limited and the inaugural event in 2011 sold out weeks before the conference. Anyone interested in participating is strongly encouraged to reserve a place now before the show is fully booked. Details can be found at Entertainment-africa.com.
