African heavy weight movie industry is facing its toughest times since its incarnation in the early 90’s.
Nigeria’s movie industry Nollywood is one of the biggest in the world, second only to Bollywood with Hollywood coming third place. The industry produces millions of movies a year with the industry going through its fast rise in the early 2000s and its movies now well known across Africa, America, Europe and most part of Asia.
The industry although known for producing low budget and poor quality home videos can now boast of releasing high quality films now premiering in cinemas across Nigeria and the rest of the world.
This is all great but the problem of movie piracy is still highly prevalent and is seriously crippling the industry.
Directors are at risk of their films being dubbed onto CDs by the black market and sold without their consent. Youtube especially has a large collection of films from the industry which can be watched by any user around the world completely free of charge.
With the recent protest from the like of Kunle Afolayan, Steph-Nora Okere, Jide Kosoko and Tunde Kelani reference from the featured image.
The issue is actually something that can be solved from within if care and due process is properly taken to hand. Directors, studios and producers/marketers need to have control of their creative work using the ‘Hollywood’ film marketing strategy, a process where newly produced movies to be release first in cinemas for at least a year depending on movie performance before been mass produced on CD for rentals / Buy.
Although the lagos state art and culture has decided to come out with a task force helping to monitor and put in place an interim legislation in protecting movie markets, only time will tell if and how it will work.
Putting up their films on youtube, online platforms with little or no security from pirates will only give access into dubbing onto CD’s. Movie produced and placed on Youtube will return a profit but with greater cost of direct accessibility to illegal downloads. A typical film produced will most likely take an editor hours to cut and compress for online media but access to illegal downloaded youtube content will only take few minutes to produce thousands of copies for the Alaba market.
A typical Hollywood movie will always make back tantalising return on investment over the years of release. By keeping a tighter finger-print of their work they are able to measure and control a higher level of returns.
You can hardly find Hollywood movies on youtube and this should also be the norm for Nollywood films. Not only will controlled distribution of these movies benefit the filmmakers, it will also benefit the audience as the quality of the films making, script writing and marketing will improve over time due to increased revenue being returned back to the industry.
This is why Okiki Platform is here. We are a mobile first platform with anti-piracy features. Okiki works closely and also collaborate with the Nollywood industry to make the change its needs.
Download the Okiki app and let help fight piracy.
https://goo.gl/Xy233e
