Video-on-demand (VOD) has previously been an unfeasible technology in much of Africa as it requires large amounts of affordable, available and reliable bandwidth in order to operate.
However, the improvement of infrastructure is driving the increased uptake of VOD in organisations, education and entertainment sectors.
So says Eckart Zollner, business development manager at Jasco Group, who notes while VOD is currently only available to a small portion of the populations of Africa, there is potential for growth in the next three to five years.
Currently, the uptake of VOD in Africa is slow because of insufficient bandwidth, says Zollner. While it has seen improvement, it remains expensive and is not accessible to the vast majority of the population, he adds.
Last year saw a number of VOD operators entering the South African market. MTN unveiled FrontRow, the first content offering from a mobile operator which promises subscribers "thousands" of movies and series episodes. Times Media also rolled out Vidi which is available on any device that can stream content, and users can plug devices into TVs via the HDMI port.
The Isizwe Project unveiled a VOD offering in Tshwane, featuring local news recorded by citizen journalists and broadcast on the Tshwane Free WiFi network. Meanwhile, Orange introduced Dailymotion, a video-sharing Web site on which users can upload, watch and share videos.
Zollner believes the mobile device market will provide justifiable cause to launch VOD services into Southern African markets. According to a recent Ericsson mobility report, by the end of 2014, there were more than 635 million mobile subscriptions in sub-Saharan Africa. This is predicted to rise to about 930 million by late 2019.
He urges telecommunication operators to find new sources of revenue as the market moves away from providing single services towards combination packages including voice, video, data, Internet and cloud services.
"VOD is an important content service for telecom operators and we have already seen organisations place an aggressive VOD service into the market."
According to Zollner, telecos are now forced to shift their revenue models to new models and VOD is an important service which will drive usage of the networks. Furthermore, it will give operators new revenue models on the existing networks, he adds.
When it comes to gearing for VOD, operators need to ensure networks can safely and securely deliver content to subscribers, with guaranteed quality of service, customer authentication and digital rights management to prevent content piracy, says Zollner.
VOD is the future of content distribution and it presents an opportunity for operators to expand their service offering and leverage new revenue models, concludes Zollner.
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