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Q&A: ‘Netflix for Africa’ Start-Up Wabona Taps Into Continent’s TV Craze

Q&A: ‘Netflix for Africa’ Start-Up Wabona Taps Into Continent’s TV Craze

The online streaming space has been mentioned as of the tech trends in Africa to watchout for this year. The need for on-demand for African media content from consumers inside and out of the continent is growing at a tremendous speed.

The service, better known as ‘Netflix for Africa’, has seen new players such as Wabona,  an internet start-up that focuses on Sub-Saharan content, empowering content creators and facilitating a distribution platform for the African diaspora, gain a lot of traction from film and TV enthusiasts in the last few years.

AFKInsider spoke to founders Simbarashe Mabasha and Simukayi Makuna about Wabona’s  growth, competitors, challenges and future plans. We also talked to one of Wabona’s investors  Pule Taukobong, chairman and founder of Africa Angels Network, on the prospects he sees in this emerging tech market.

AFKInsider: What inspired you to start Wabona? Does it still inspire you now that the venture has taken off?

The journey to Wabona was an interesting one. We started out by building a production company as we are avid film and TV enthusiasts and were very much frustrated by the state of African motion picture storytelling. We found some big challenges in this venture and we pivoted and started Wabona in an effort to not only control distribution of our own content but that of others. The main inspiration for Wabona was the lack of sustainable distribution for African filmmakers and producers. We wanted to disrupt that space.

Wabona is like a growing child, each day you learn something new, be it a new challenge or a new victory. So we are still inspired on a daily basis by Wabona.

AFKInsider:  How did you manage to raise the initial funding to start Wabona?

We raised the initial funding from Angel Investors like Africa Angels Network, who continue to support us.

AFKInsider:  What is Wabona all about and how are you going to make money?

Wabona (Sotho for ‘You See’& pronounced Waa-Bo-Nah) is an online video streaming service. Wabona delivers African video content to markets in the Africa and African Diaspora.

Wabona provides an exciting service that is easy to use via the web and mobile devices. Wabona allows instant access to video-on-demand through a growing online video library with African TV shows, documentaries and films.

In essence Wabona is about providing classic and modern African TV, film and documentary entertainment on-demand, without schedule or expensive subscription fees. Wabona.com (web service) costs US$5.99 per month subscription. Cinemo, Wabona’s mobile service is a free Ad-supported service.

AFKInsider:  What were the main challenges setting up Wabona in South Africa? How did you overcome them?

The main challenges we faced focused mainly on getting people (market, investors, Telcos) to understand that video streaming is the future of video content distribution in South Africa, Africa and the world. The internet at times has been seen as a luxury for the upwardly mobile and thus expensive. The lack of internet infrastructure in Africa also lent a negative voice to our cause.

However, we were confident in the fact that the internet in Africa was improving, mobile broadband and 3G services were growing, devices were becoming cheaper and video streaming was disrupting content distribution outside Africa, led by Netflix.

We just waited a bit and everything we predicted happened. We positioned Wabona to capitalise on the fast changing space and those perceived obstacles became easier to tackle. We started in the African Diaspora as the problems particular to Africa, were not universal and thus we launched Wabona outside Africa. Once things begun to change in Africa we aggressively pursued a mobile solution for African users, which we did via Cinemo.