With more of the world consuming entertainment online rather than through traditional channels, Nigeria’s iBAKA TV has leveraged this growing demand by creating an experience that celebrates the best of African entertainment and technology.
Through its subscription-based video-on-demand (VOD) streaming service offered directly to viewers via the Internet, iBAKA TV’s ultimate goal is to contribute to the expansion of the VOD market worldwide through partnering with major players in the industry.
Technology has proven powerful in ensuring viewers get a seamless entertainment experience.
With Nollywood being a booming movie industry in Nigeria, subscription video on demand (SVOD) revenue is projected to reach US$729 million by 2021.
IBAKA secures Nollywood content distribution by licensing movies directly from the content owners so the world can watch more Nollywood non-stop.
But delivering over 15 000 hours of Nollywood blockbuster movies and TV series comes with its challenges.
The iBAKA TV streaming service has experienced multiple difficulties with regards to their website hosting and efficiency, as their aim is to offer viewers high resolution content faster, with low latency and at low cost.
Faced with such a challenge, they decided to invest in AWS’s cloud services such as Amazon S3 Bucket, Amazon, Elastic Load Balancing and AWS Elemental MediaStore.
The services provide reliable and durable data storage, handle the varying load of application traffic, as well as provide a storage service optimised for media.
Amazon Cloudfront’s fast content delivery network service in particular has aided in securely delivering content to customers globally with low latency and high transfer speeds.
Because of this, iBAKA TV viewers can now view, on average, up to a 50% reduction in first-byte latency when wishing to access watchable content.
IBAKA has chosen to work with AWS because of the breadth and depth of this platform.
AWS provides flexibility and scalability, helping it to scale up and down with ease and to balance loads.
Blessed Idornigie, Chief Executive Officer at iBAKA TV said, “We are happy to work with Amazon Web Services to provide our viewers with the highest quality African video content on our video-on-demand platform.”
Now able to serve high-resolution videos with reduced data consumption and increased security, the website is also accessible from any part of the world, whether it be through laptop, tablet or mobile device.
