VIDEOAGE September 2024 African Content 12 (Continued from Cover) took a place among the North Americans and Western Europeans who first saw the value in working on an international scale. All of this is, of course, very tantalizing to content buyers and sellers alike. The question in 2024 though is whether this moment is still coming for Africa, or if it has already come and gone and was barely noticed. For sure, Africa holds incredible potential. No right-minded contemporary person isn’t familiar with the basic fact that the continent is on the fast track to becoming more populous, more youthful, more urban, more mobile, and more networked. We all know this. However, in terms of how this will impact the international content landscape and whether buyers and sellers should be getting excited, that’s a little tougher to say. The entrance to the global stage in the past coincided with a time of inflated license fees and a limited number of platforms — chiefly cable and satellite. That’s not the case now. Acquisition executives the world over are buying for subscription platforms on a good day, and advertising driven platforms on a less good day. And so, in most cases, regardless of the quality, genre, and running time of the content being acquired, this just isn’t 1997, when the popularity of cable and satellite was peaking around the world. Coupled with that is the fact that even with the best African series and films now getting a look over by broadcasters and platforms outside the continent, there’s also just so much more content — old and new — coming out from Africa, and so many more ways to watch it, often for free. Again, that’s not to say that the content being produced in Africa isn’t world-class. It’s just that it may be entering the greater world at a less opportune moment. And the African-made content is indeed world-class. Those broadcasters and platforms that have dived in have typically been rewarded. Lance Schwulst, EVP of Content Strategy for U.S.-based MHz Choice, an SVoD platform specializing in international series and films, has repeatedly found success with the series he’s acquired from South Africabased MultiChoice. “It’s exciting to see this recent wave of wellcrafted and compelling storytelling coming out of the African market,” Schwulst said. He then continued: “It’s imbued new life and given audiences a perspective into the world of international television that has been well received by our viewers.” MHz Choice just closed on a significant package of titles that included the second season of the hit series Lioness, as well as Donkerbos, a series that first premiered at the Berlinale Series Markets Selects. Both were from MultiChoice. Bruce Rabinowitz, who has been representing several catalogs of African content, including MultiChoice, for the past decade, agrees. “Once TV acquisition executives are introduced to the African content, they immediately see the potential. The quality and diversity in the storytelling, the state-of-the-art production values, and in many cases their interest to having Africa represented among their other selections of international programming are all incentives, and of course all this is coupled with the ease of doing business with the continent,” Rabinowitz said. “Clearly, there’s a lot of untapped value in the African continent’s content. South Africa in particular, and MultiChoice as Africa’s leader in video entertainment and a producer of authentic African stories, offers international buyers the broadest range of genres. Everything that a content buyer would expect from a global platform: A classic library of feature films, long running and limited series, reality and documentaries from award-winning African and international filmmakers. But that’s not to say that other commercial channels and platforms throughout Africa and various state broadcasters aren’t also producing content that deserves to be seen, and should be seen, globally.” Rabinowitz also commented on the premier African TV market: “MIP Africa this month is still a relatively new market and for the global buyer it’s not clear yet whether it’s an essential market to attend for everyone. Certainly, if one is determined to get a concentrated sense of what’s happening in Africa, MIP Africa is a must-attend. But on the other hand, if one is going to look at Africa as having had, for a while now, the level of compelling content and business savvy to get its content out to the rest of the world (as many of us believe has been strongly demonstrated) any global market anywhere in the world should be appropriate for African content to be presented and licensed.” That’s not to say that the content being produced in Africa isn’t world-class. It’s just that it may be entering the greater world at a less opportune moment.
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