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iROKOtv's 'Netflix of Africa' bet: $100M spent, Nollywood streaming shut down in 2025
Lagos-born iROKOtv bet Nollywood fans would pay for legal streaming; Tiger Global, Kinnevik and Canal+ backed it, and $100M later the service was shut down.
iROKOtv (Iroko Partners)
What the business is
A video-on-demand platform for Nollywood movies and series, later paired with ROK, a production and TV-channel business.
Starting capital：$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.
How it started
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).
What happened
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.
How it ended up
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.
Background
iROKOtv was a Lagos-born video-on-demand platform for Nollywood movies and series, founded by Jason Njoku and Bastian Gotter and launched in August 2011 after a Nollywood Love YouTube channel. TechCrunch called it 'the Netflix of Africa' as Tiger Global, Kinnevik and Rise Capital backed it to $21M by December 2013, when it claimed 1M monthly users and a 5,000-movie catalogue watched in 178 countries.
The bet was that Nollywood fans would pay to stream licensed films, starting with the diaspora — half of the 2013 audience was in the UK and US — and then flipping to subscribers in Africa. The company raised about $40M through 2016, began financing its own productions, and added ROK, a content and TV-channel arm that became its profit engine.
The market never materialized in Nigeria. Njoku says the company spent $100M over a decade, raised only $1.1M after 2019, exited Nigeria in 2023 after concluding there was no market for paid premium services, and announced the closure in June 2025. BusinessDay reported the shutdown as part of a wider retreat in which Showmax also left Africa in April 2026.
The counterfactual is stark: ROK, the content-and-channels business, was sold to Vivendi/Canal+ for $25M and generated most of the revenue. Njoku's own post-mortem — that $5–10M would have been enough to learn the lesson — has become a reference point for founders about over-raising in thin-margin markets.
What has to be true
- 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.
What can be applied
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.
Aftermath
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.
Sources
- The Scramble For Africa Continues — iROKOtv Closes $8M To Be The Netflix Of Africa
- Iroko TV Dark on Debt Dispute, Future Plans
- We spent $100m trying to win, says Jason Njoku on IrokoTV shutdown
- NolliStream bets on Nigeria's mobile audience as Showmax, IROKOtv retreat
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