I don't get how Netflix-of-$NICHE can be a long term business. It seems that once $NICHE-stream demonstrates sufficient demand, Netflix can simply license the same content and provide customers with a superset of the content that $NICHE-stream provides.
It's also unclear to me that Netflix is even lacking in this specific niche. My ex-girlfriend loved browsing my netflix over a VPN because it had so much of her african american comedy. (Admittedly, what she - an African woman - considered a good selection might be different from what westerners consider a good selection.)
In a few cases, e.g. Parables ($NICHE=devout christians), I can see how they offer something different - they deliberately exclude content (e.g., movies that offend christian sensibilities) that their members don't want. But that doesn't seem to apply here.
Hey,
Thank you for the feedback :)
I am Ludovic, Cofounder and CTO of Afrostream.
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
Your analogy breaks down though, because the big three channels could only air one show at a time. Netflix can license (or make) as many shows as they want without hurting their popular appeal.
Basically, if you're successful, there's nothing stopping Netflix from licensing the same shows as you. Since they're Netflix, they'll probably negotiate better content deals, have better recommendations, better mobile apps, more supported devices, etc.
Another danger is that Netflix has experience making their own shows. If your target audience looks enticing enough, Netflix can produce exclusive content to woo them over. They've already started doing this with anime (Knights of Sidonia).
All-in-all, this seems like a really tricky business to be in. I wish you luck.
I understood your point of view. Netflix is better than us now, that's a fact.
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.
I don't know about the others, but the thing that Crunchyroll does differently than Netflix is that it's a lot more like the Steam of Anime. Prior to Crunchyroll, it was extremely common (still is, I think) for fans to simply download fan-subbed versions of content and the license holders wouldn't see any money until they were able to sign a deal with a distribution company that would later sell a series on disc.
Crunchyroll provides the immediacy of fansubs but with legitimacy and sees that license holders get paid something where they weren't getting paid anything.
Additionally, the type of content that Crunchyroll provides isn't necessarily something Netflix would go after, in that it is released on an episode by episode basis (in line with air dates in Japan) rather than all at once (as is the typical Netflix model) and that there is rarely dubbing (which most, though notably not all, Netflix anime has).
That said, Netflix has been seriously expanding their anime efforts. I really do wonder if Crunchyroll is going to be able to keep growing as Netflix expands its presence more and more.
All that said, the one thing I'm really not sure of is how long Netflix can continue to do more and more licensing deals and original content without increasing its subscription cost. In that respect, I think the iTunes model is a lot more stable (and I'm perfectly happy paying for close-to-airtime delivery I get for the shows I do watch through it).
My only gripe with paying for that content is that the price premium seems to be pretty high on iTunes given that the content has revocable DRM (then again, Apple is more likely to be around in this space for a long time than any of the other current players).
In summary: I think you might be right, but it's definitely a pretty dynamic situation. Hope it goes well!
I want to echo the other reply to this post. Crunchyroll offers its customers a way to view the shows as they are released, which was a big change from how anime was normally consumed. Viki works because of the very strong fan subbing community that it has built. From my point of view the best way to compete with Netflix is to find a niche that is hard for them to fill. It's unlikely that Netflix can get people to sub their shows for free. Netflix wasn't designed with the queue type setup that crunchy roll has, etc.
As far as technical challenges on streaming/hosting in Africa - I remember hearing about Kili (http://kili.io/) on HN a while ago. They do AWS-like infrastructure located in Nairobi, so could make it easy to get started in East Africa. Good luck!
I'm not sure the comparison with Drama Fever (or even Crunchyroll) is fair. There was an enormous market of people looking for Asian content (as evidenced by the fansub scene, and Asian-themed conventions worldwide), which made the bet much safer. An African Drama Fever would probably have to create its market to reach such a stage.
That said, it's a good idea, a big bet, and I sincerely wish you the best.
Hi, just a small question. Is "Intouchables" a film you would carry or does the majority of the cast need to be "African-American" (or Afro-French, Afro-Brazilian, etc etc)?
Intouchables is definitely an Afrostream movie. We want to show some positive characters who are Afro-descendants and it's definitely a movie which shows that
> I don't get how Netflix-of-$NICHE can be a long term business. It seems that once $NICHE-stream demonstrates sufficient demand, Netflix can simply license the same content and provide customers with a superset of the content that $NICHE-stream provides.
The marginal value of content with a strong, dedicated, but niche following to Netflix -- whose branding is mainstream and not targeted to that niche -- may be less than it is to a provider specialized in targeting that niche, which means that the licensing fee Netflix could afford to pay is less.
Further, your argument presupposes that all streaming licenses are non-exclusive. That is, rather decidedly, not the case. If someone else secures an exclusive license, Netflix cannot license the same content and provide customers with a superset of what the niche provider offers.
> It's also unclear to me that Netflix is even lacking in this specific niche.
It probably isn't compared to any major provider that a consumer is going to find today. OTOH, it could be in the future, especially if a more targeted competitor exists that starts outbidding Netflix for exclusive licenses for content in that niche.
"The marginal value of content with a strong, dedicated, but niche following to Netflix -- whose branding is mainstream and not targeted to that niche -- may be less than it is to a provider specialized in targeting that niche, which means that the licensing fee Netflix could afford to pay is less."
Yes, I had yummyfajita's question and this does make sense... a "niche" (this is pretty big to be calling "niche" really, but let me discuss the generic case) could afford to charge a bit more of interested customers and focus that stream on somewhat more pricy licenses.
Which, once again, just makes me think that Netflix is, if not "cutting itself off at the knees", at least hobbling itself with such a low flat-rate price. On the other hand it can hardly afford a complicated "full cable"-style offering, but some sort of middle ground may be something they're forced to do someday. Hulu, too, for that matter... even as a subscription service focused on TV it seems to me that the selection is limited by the fact the subscription price is just too low.
In the meantime, as a consumer I have no trouble mixing a nice Netflix subscription for flat-rate stuff and mixing in per-show fees from Amazon, but it's still money Netflix seems to be leaving on the table.
I can't think of any modern non-monopoly companies that have obtained global domination without a need to perpetually acquire niche competitors along the way. That's especially so as several companies (Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, and non-US players at large) vie for limited attention.
> It seems that once $NICHE-stream demonstrates sufficient demand, Netflix can simply license the same content and provide customers with a superset of the content that $NICHE-stream provides.
I would not be so quick to discount the difficulty of building a large number of commercial relationships in the long tail of African production. The mere time investment and tedium of dealing with producers who are not used to distribution channels beyond their local habits is a barrier to entry - and hence a valid strategic positioning.
But does this not apply to the startup as well as the incumbent. There is nothing to suggest that it will cost a startup less than Netflix to negotiate all these contracts.
> Netflix can simply license the same content and provide customers with a superset of the content that $NICHE-stream provides
"can" is always a problem with big companies, they have so many other works to do they rarely get time. Thats where small companies can win some niche market and do a better job.
If you consider Netflix more analogous to HBO[1]than to cable than this is similar to BET.
I think individual channels will win out over cable style packages, though there might be room for an aggregator that offers discounts.
I'd rather pay for HBO and Netflix over cable.
To my knowledge the majority of cable channels are just content from a handful of producers divided up by "genre", since most people will have entire sections of unused channels that don't match their interest when paying for cable I think we'll move towards pick and choose — possibly really soon.
[1]Which is their quoted mission, "become HBO faster than HBO can become us".
They could try, but in the Afrostream case, could they catch up with the community we build. I mean, we have 72k facebook page fans, and a lot of their bought a one year subscription because they are ignored about their movie needs in first case. I am the first fans of my fans too.
Let's face it : Netflix could do that, but they have one year to catch up, fight is on
Netflix is huge. No offense, but I doubt they'd have to do much "catching up" with the userbase. Most of your subscribers are probably already Netflix subscribers and would be happy to cut their monthly expenditures by unsubscribing from your service once Netflix offers the same content. Your play would be original content and/or exclusive licensing that makes it so Netflix can't easily duplicate your service, at least not without years of waiting for licensing contracts to expire. This is the same dilemma Netflix faced as content producers started to ask why they can't just cut Netflix out, and Netflix solved it with compelling original content.
It seems part of your argument is that your content is so niche, Netflix would rather spend licensing money on content that has broader appeal, which is fine, except that its totally dependent on Netflix not changing its strategy, and that's a bad basis for a sustainable business.
As i said, I hate the world Niche, and I never use it only to say I hated this word,
African descent movies are so diverse. We have an African Diaspora all over the world which produce a ton of contents you never saw, you don't even know their existence and thant's our goal to diversify the point of view of a maximum of people. Yes Netflix has resources, a lot of resources but we know our market well. They need to catch up, that's my word for now, fight is on
"They have to raise prices or start offering mix&match packages" makes sense to me. Since they seem to resist this, it locks them out of these sorts of markets. Is that a good idea? Well, that's above my pay grade....
We don't intend to be "Netflix for blacks" or "Netflix for African people only" too, that's a bizarre idea to me, in fact.
We have some quality movies in our catalog, and we hope to make it discover to all of you people :)
I must point out that such a service exist, and it's one of the most successful startups out of Africa. It's called Irokotv, and at best afrosteam is a clone of this service. I was quite surprised the techcrunch article nor anyone else didn't mention them, here's a 2013 article from techcrunch after Irokotv closed $8 million in another round of funding- http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/17/the-scramble-for-africa-con...
Quite frankly, I am tired of the tag, Netflix of "insert region where Netflix doesn't operate"
I would like to know if the founders of Afrostream will deny to being a clone of Irokotv
We know very well Jason, the founder of Irokotv, we had some discussions with him just a few days ago.
Irokotv is very centered on movies from Nollywood, and has started to have some movies from Hollywood.
We have another point of view :
We are not the Netflix of a specific region, or the Netflix for certain people. We are the Netflix of the African Diaspora powered contents. We want to show what Afro descendants are capable of, and we want to solve the distribution problem of theses movies all over the world.
Irokotv was here first, and yes we will have Nigerian contents. But we have other goals. We want to distribute, create and show to the world how some contents you couldn't see are incredible. We want to show that we could have our black Superman, or our black James Bond. We want to expose all of the richness of all the African cultures (in USA, Brazil, France, UK, Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Angola, Nigeria and more), all over the world
So, there are certainly valid questions about whether one can build a "Netflix-of-$NICHE", but I want to point to a lovely little example named Crunchyroll.
You can definitely succeed in a niche, provided you have some factors in your favor:
1. An audience that is dedicated to the content you serve
2. The ability to focus on the niche provides you a greater library than broader competitors have
3. The ability to market yourself in such a way that you build reputation with the core audience
The end result is you can create a product that other people will pass up competing offerings for that might have broader appeal - or will simply subscribe to both.
Netflix used to be the go-to for Anime for a long period of time. However, Crunchyroll was able to provide a much more massive library of anime on-demand and catered to the dedicated fanbase.
I tried to watch an anime on there once. When I clicked play I got a preroll ad, fine. 30 seconds in, the same ad played again. I hope that's not normal because if it is I have no idea how people can stand it.
BET worked. CrunchyRoll worked. I think the service has a good chance of making it if there's demand in this niche and they focus on delivering where it's strongest. If they stream to U.S., too, we might also see some interesting movies and culture we'd otherwise not be exposed to. Regarding Netflix, they might compete but I doubt it given what the co-founder has said. More likely, a company like Netflix would acquire them to inherit and exploit the market they created. That's just my guess.
Seems Netflix is a big concern for a lot of people here. Since I am a subscriber to Netflix too, I think my first action is to unsubscribe soon to help us. Just kidding.
Netflix has some flaws too. And we intend to exploit them :) , let the fight begin
Haha. Stay a subscriber to Netflix so you can spot the strengths to copy and problems to avoid. Competitive intelligence for $7 a month is hard to beat. ;)
I think the biggest thing for you company, though, is to just put all your effort into getting operational where demand and connectivity are strongest. Don't worry about the others too much: you'll just get overstretched. Many projects have made that mistake. Just add them gradually over time.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
I'm absolutely certain you're just buried with the existing work of just
getting your new startup rolling with its original idea (African centric
movies), so put this (somewhat obvious) suggestion on your "possible
expansion ideas for maybe someday" list.
Something I find lacking on broadcast TV is news coverage of Africa. In
the US, the only place where you'll find regular English language
broadcast TV news coverage of Africa is, oddly enough, through CCTV
("China Central Television" via the Chinese government). Though it is
already possible to get _some_ African news coverage over the web, news
as a content source for your service might be a worthwhile addition.
According to CCTV coverage, African radio broadcasting is (supposedly)
extremely popular and far more widespread than TV. The pervasive use of
radio is (supposedly) due to radio being less expensive than TV and far
more widely adopted by the general populace. The part I found the most
interesting is how both pre-recorded and live serial drama, niche, and
educational shows are still being broadcast in Africa over radio (along
with the expected music, news, and talk shows). Though it's audio rather
than video and there a many companies in the "African Internet Radio"
business, radio might (eventually) be another appealing content source
for you.
I wonder about the African part. African cultures, and languages, vary a lot. There is zero cultural crossover between Zulus, Marsai and Egyptians for example.
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.
How will you deal with language variety ? Original soundtrack in Xhosa ? Wolof with French subtitles ? How would anyone even subtitle Nouchi in English ? Dubbed with more care than your average Nollywood cookie-cutter family drama ? Or dubbed like a cheap telenovella ? Multiple audio & sub options ? You contract the post-production yourself ? Je wanda grave !
We are working with some people all over the world for subtitling and dubbing.
We will not dub massively, we prefer people discover contents in their original format, with subtitles in their languages. we will dub in certain cases, though, with the good people.
Sure, the farther you get from a place, the less people know about those distinctions. Americans will say that a restaurant or hotel has a "European feel" to it, even though Europe is also a diverse continent.
I think one great thing about this is exposing non Africans to African content.
It will allow Americans (and others in the world) to learn more about actual modern African cultures. People might be surprised, hopefully not, how middle class Africans are not that different from middle classes of other ethnicities. Sure, there will be some cultural difference and there will be an accusation of Nigerian cultural imperialism, as their programming dominates, but so does Mexican culture on the rest of LatAm.
The programming may even prove to offer more authentic and aspirational programing to blacks everywhere bypassing hollywoods imprimatur --which can only be good.
Lots of African content is in English or french or with subs.
Plus, black Americans might be interested in programming from African countries, there is a historical connection, most non latams in the us have their own native programming from Hollywood, so there is no void to be filled by Univision. They are filling the void for latams in the us, however. Still Univision mostly presents Mexican content while latam is much larger than just Mexico.
How good is your non-Nigerian selection? Having had a Nigerian girlfriend I'm familiar with Nigerian cinema and shows, but I'm completely ignorant about the rest of African films.
We knew better the sub-saharan countries for instance, so our network and focus is to go there first. We have a lot of work to have the best catalog from there first, and then we could extend.
I did an Ask HN over 500 days ago wondering why there weren't any specialized Netflix sites. It didn't get a lot of traction though there were a few answers.
I'm still waiting for a foreign film 'Netflix'...one day.
try mubi.com, it has a good selection of foreign films. It 'stocks' 30 films with one being taken up/down everyday, so there anyways something new to watch.
I must point out that such a service exist, and it's one of the most successful startups out of Africa. It's called Irokotv, and at best afrosteam is a clone of this service. I was quite surprised the techcrunch article nor anyone else didn't mention them. Here's a 2013 article from techcrunch after Irokotv closed $8 million in another round of funding- http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/17/the-scramble-for-africa-con...
Quite frankly, I am tired of the tag, Netflix of "insert region where Netflix doesn't operate".
I would like to know if the founders of Afrostream will deny to being a clone of Irokotv
The african channel that does not work in most of africa :-) No, I know it's hard to secure rights everywhere, but no streaming service works in my parts of africa.
Hey, I am Ludovic, Cofounder and CTO of Afrostream,
You are right, there are some technical challenges here. I don't know where you live exactly. We will not launch in all the continents now, there is no sense here. We are working with some Internet and mobile providers to facilitate access to Afrostream. Mobile is the key word here : people have access to cheap android smartphones, and there will be a lot of deployment of 3G and 4G Networks in the months to come.
In part we have acquired rights for a group of countries in Africa, so there will be a blocking by IP. Other part is yes, some regions are under-equipped, and we will be there with some Internet providers which are deploying their networks to have some interesting contents at the start.
Would pay for Netflix for Asian movies. They have some quite incredible flicks there, but without the language knowledge it's often hard to get access to them.
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)
Why is it racist to showcase African media? The founders readily admit in this thread that they are trying to get more exposure for all African cultures, not some African monoculture.
It is not racism. It is (positive) discrimination.
If we keep everything the same, but target a different demographic this service could be called: WhiteStream, a Netflix for whites and white-culture movies.
"The persuit of happiness" is classified as an Afro-American movie. Why is that? Does it portray black culture? Or is it because one or more actors have a black skin? I think it is the latter, because the theme from the movie is universal and transcends race.
James Bond is a hero, not because he is white, but because of his actions. Asking why there is no black James Bond is forcing race on an old fictitious English character (why do you care about the skin color of your heroes?). How to classify Morgan Freeman movies on the Afro-American scale? Add "Driving Miss Daisy" to the catalog, but leave out "Evan Almighty"?
"I’m going to stop calling you a white man. And, I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace and you know me as Morgan Freeman. You don’t say, "Well, ahem! This white guy named Mike Wallace." You don’t say it."
The point is that Netflix is already WhiteStream. Being 'race-blind' isn't inherently a bad thing, but within a white-biased culture, some things need to change before we can leave race behind.
The point remains valid - why isn't there a black James Bond? Because Hollywood doesn't think Americans will go to a movie starring a black hero. It's really a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you don't film the movie, they won't watch it.
(Driving Miss Daisy is not a great example of Afro-positive movies, but whatever)
That's an absolutely ludicrous statement to make, for lots of reasons. Half!? I'm going to just leave some actual, scientific studies instead regarding race and gender in movies.
(17% of movies didn't even have a single speaking black character, as of 2013)
It takes a movie and cuts together every single word & sentence spoken by an actor of color. Often the intro music is longer than the compiled lines. Moonrise Kingdom: 10 seconds.
I love Morgan Freeman by the way. A man who played a president of the USA, and God multiple times, is exactly what you need to show everywhere, not only on Afrostream
Is it positive discrimination ? Since there is a political implication there, I don't think so, but I will try to answer.
Do you know the movie "Ride Along" ? It did more than 100M$ in the American market for a budget of 25M$. This movie has one of the best start of any movie all time in January.
Do you know how we could see this movie outside USA. Not in a movie theater in France, though. Piracy is the first channel to see african-american movies in Europe and Africa.
Some movies are not well distributed and it appears so that a lot of these movies are from or with an African descent castings. That's not fair. We will correct this fact. And if you want to call this positive discrimination, why not.
Afrostream is a service which will permit to show movies which are not shown in a lot of countries in a legal way. That's our political statement.
I am all for positive discrimination. For instance I do not think it is a bad idea to have all-women hackathons -- I do not think that's unfair. I furthermore wish you all the best with the business and I get the pitch: Besides the mainstream movies there is an entire untapped market of non-Hollywood movies with a lot of potential for growth. This is, after all, a business, not a political party (please avoid this debate entirely).
> Afrostream is a service which will permit to show movies which are not shown in a lot of countries in a legal way. That's our political statement.
this is my gripe with positive discrimination. it is still discrimination.
you could have been embracing everyone. but you did the same that was being done before, and picked the single second largest group. why not call it low-budget-movies-netflix. or hard-to-watch-in-france-netflix? why pick one group/race and leave others out? that is just ...bad business practice :) you could have been streaming iranian movies as well, for example.
It's not really discrimination, since nobody is excluded here. If you weren't into sports, would you complain about ESPN excluding non-sports-watchers?
But in answer to your implied question "Why do you need a space/channel/site of your own?", the answer is that the larger space (France) is already white by default. Whites don't really need their own space, because they're the dominant majority, and media is generally made with them in mind already. So, if minorities don't carve out their own spaces, they will live entirely in a culture that doesn't represent them.
My fiance is half-black, and she's not that into TV/movies. I once asked her why, and she said that after a while, she just got tired of rarely seeing people like herself on-screen.
you don't understand my point here : We do not do a service for specific people, we do a service with specific contents.
I will try with another argument : Tyler Perry is one the most prominent performer of the USA. He did movies, series, theater. All successful. He is maybe the most complete artist in the USA. These productions were distributed in the USA. You can't find these production in France by example, but either in a lot of countries.
Why ?
Afrostream's goal here is to distribute Tyler Perry and other talents all over the world. As I said, I don't know if this is positive dsicrimination, but Afrostream is my political statement to this 'Why'
so you think it's valid that the racist movie distribution industry in France only distribute non-African culture (whatever that is) movies? i mean, by your standard, limiting by skin color is doing a service to someone...
The problem here is that movies with black people (as we said in France, we need to call a cat a cat, we need to define clearly the skin here), had to be seen everywhere, not only in France, because that's why the movies need to be : to watch by the most. And that's what we are doing, making exposure to underserved movies. And we are doing even in some underserved countries
We don't need to deal with racism, we want to tackle it.
It's serving a specific market. Is it discriminatory that Maybelline, the makeup company, doesn't...embrace...men? or that there are specific makeup lines for people with dark skin? or light skin? Is it discriminatory that there exist companies that translate books only into Estonian, a language that very people read? Clearly they should also do Spanish and Xhosa to be "non-discriminatory," despite selling only in Estonia. DramaFever focused initially on Asian content; is that discriminatory? People wanted that stuff, and then paid for it. Just like tall people buy pants that are longer, and there's an IDE specifically for Ruby! (Positive discrimination, I cry!!)
To demand that every company do everything is ridiculous. It is very American to think that focusing on Afro-diaspora culture is somehow "racist" or "discrimination." The company is launching in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Senegal and Ivory Coast. Why would they stream Iranian movies as their first move? Should they also include documentaries and calculus lessons?
Why pick one group, one business goal? Because they'd like to have a successful business and that's how you start.
To have a black James Bond, we need to have a better representation of what is black.
Blaxploitation (yet I would love to have this movie in Afrostream) was positive in a sens that it gives positive heroes who are black and it's very important to me that Black people think they could be what they want to be.
By the way, I dreamed to be Shaft when I was younger.
But let's face it, We don't have a lot of movies like that anymore, or they are not internationally distributed.
That's the question we want to solve with Afrostream.
Of course African culture exists, it's the culture of the African continent and its diaspora, which is widespread, rich, and diverse. What does the "Afro" in "Afrostream" stand for if it isn't African culture? And of course there are subcultures. It's the same situation with (East) Asian culture.
That is not, for sure, a territory we have yet explored, (becasue there is a LOT of contents to explore in other countries first, and we have more a West Africa background), but yes we will look for Egyptian movies in the future.
Let's face it : Will Smith played in a lot of top movies in this decade. Could you name another one ? :)
In France we have a Will Smith example too, His name is Omar Sy (saw in the last Jurassic World).
For one Will Smith, you have here in USA Tyler Perry, Kevin Hart, Chris Tucker, Chris Rock, Spike Lee (sorry for all the women I forgot here). These guys are awesome too. We want them everywhere in the world.
Hey,
I am Ludovic, cofounder and CTO of Afrostream. And I am black too, and French :) (yes I certainly have many other flaws too)
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 ?
I was one of the YC partners who interviewed and funded Afrostream. We made the call to fund because we fundamentally believe in this team and market. We accept companies not because they are flawless. No companies are, and none of the startups that succeed have been. They all have specific challenges. But we ask ourselves, is this a talented team, and is this something people want? Is there a path for this to be a big business? In both cases, yes.
Congratulations Ludovic! I just want to echo that this is absolutely an underserved market. Yes there are definitely challenges, but also great opportunities. African content is just really beginning to emerge; Nollywood and the like are just scratching the surface and yet to unearth the richness of 1000's of years of heritage. Kudos also to YC buying in :)
Interesting racism on display here. You've assumed Afrostream is "obviously unsustainable", even though many people in the comments disagree. And because it's run by black people, you've assumed they couldn't have possibly gotten into YC on their own merit.
Had it been helmed by an Indian person, I doubt you'd have cast any aspersions about their talent or being a "diversity pawn".
It's also unclear to me that Netflix is even lacking in this specific niche. My ex-girlfriend loved browsing my netflix over a VPN because it had so much of her african american comedy. (Admittedly, what she - an African woman - considered a good selection might be different from what westerners consider a good selection.)
In a few cases, e.g. Parables ($NICHE=devout christians), I can see how they offer something different - they deliberately exclude content (e.g., movies that offend christian sensibilities) that their members don't want. But that doesn't seem to apply here.