iROKOtv's 'Netflix of Africa' bet: $100M spent, Nollywood streaming shut down in 2025

A video-on-demand platform for Nollywood movies and series, later paired with ROK, a production and TV-channel business.

Nollywood fans — first the diaspora, then Africans — will pay to stream licensed Nigerian films; Nigeria's data-cost economy would not sustain it if wrong.

$35M in venture capital raised in the first decade (Tiger Global, Kinnevik, Rise Capital, Canal+), per founder Jason Njoku; the company says it spent roughly $100M in total trying to win.

Jason Njoku and Bastian Gotter started a YouTube channel, Nollywood Love, in December 2010, then launched iROKOtv in August 2011 as a paid streaming service for Nigerian films. Tiger Global backed it early as part of a global bet on local content, and by December 2013 the company had raised $21M total, claimed 1M monthly users and the world's largest online catalogue of African content (5,000+ movies, watched in 178 countries).

Through 2016 iROKO raised roughly $40M and began financing its own Nollywood productions while expanding across Africa. By 2019 the content arm ROK Studios had become the real profit engine, and the company sold its ROK stake to Vivendi/Canal+ for $25M (per Culture Custodian and the founder's account). Njoku says the company raised only $1.1M more after that, spent $100M over the decade, and by 2023 concluded there was no market for paid premium streaming in Nigeria, exiting the country after payment and data-cost economics never worked.

Gone. In June 2025 Njoku announced iROKOtv's closure in a blog post titled 'We Spent $100m Trying to Win, But Couldn't'; BusinessDay confirmed in 2026 that the platform had closed after 15 years of operation. A Lagos Federal High Court had frozen accounts in January 2024 over an unpaid $68,780 licensing debt (Culture Custodian), and the company had already exited Nigeria in 2023.

iROKOtv was one of Africa's best-funded internet companies by 2013 ($21M, per TechCrunch), yet paid streaming never took off — a rare full arc from hype to shutdown.

The founder's own numbers — $35M raised, $100M spent, $5–10M would have sufficed — are a first-hand post-mortem of over-raising.

The profitable asset turned out to be content and channels (ROK), which Canal+ bought for $25M, not the streaming subscription — a pivot available years earlier.

Netflix, Amazon, Showmax and Iflix together poured over $1B into the same market and also retreated, so the failure was structural, not just execution.

A category bet and $100M could not create a paid streaming market where data costs made $5/month a luxury; over-raising delays finding out that unit economics don't work.

As of September 2026, iROKOtv is closed; BusinessDay covered the shutdown while reporting on Showmax's April 2026 exit from Africa. Njoku's June 2025 essay said the company exited Nigeria in 2023, had processed no Naira payments for almost two years, and that the lasting value lay in ROK-style content and distribution rather than subscriptions. Mary Njoku retained her stake in ROK after the Canal+ sale, and the family's production business continues separately.