The emergence of the internet in Nigeria and Africa can never be quantified as a mere write up. Nigeria is one of the few countries in the world that has a huge online presence that cuts across all sectors of the economy through platforms such as social media, online banking, online stores, etc.

Filmmaking is one of the most lucrative businesses in Nigeria ;However there are many bottlenecks filmmakers continue to face; these includes minimal government and private sector sponsorship and aid , proper policies and guidelines set in place to ensure full copyright protection of the movies against piracy. As a result, an average filmmaker and producer does not consider producing quality movies, instead his interest lies in how much profit he stands to gain even before shooting the movie which makes him cut corners during production resulting in sub standard movies.

With the continous increase in piracy, producers have sought alternative means of selling their movies in order to recoup their capital not to even talk about profit as this has proven to be a daunting task.
DSTV (Digital Satellite Television) one of the biggest digital satellite TV services in Africa is one of the few platforms producers sell their movie for a negotiated price to air for a specified period of time . IROKO PARTNERS one of the pioneers of the online movie distribution platform founded by Jason Njoku brought life to Nollywood when he began paying millions of naira to buy exclusive internet right of these movies (old and new) from producers.

Fast forward to six years after IROKO PARTNERS, Nigerians with their enterprising spirit have begun dabbling into online movie content management. A lot of Nollywood channels on youtube have sprung up. There are over a thousand “Nolly” something on YouTube with the same content. Most of them put up same video on over twenty different channels with twenty different titles. This has become the only source for producers to make money as all other avenues such as selling exclusive rights to online movie distributors and digital satellite TV services have become difficult , since some of these online distributors and digital television services are producing movies themselves with little or no need for external content.

Most of these filmmakers and producers have resorted to creating short movie clips now commonly called “internet movies” targeted at a specific audience on youtube, in order to gain a large subscriber base with the aim of making money on these movies online.
I took a trip to Alaba international market the other day and the movie section was like a war affected zone as some of them I spoke to had similar things to say about the issue ;“Internet/YouTube has killed us and our business” in their own words. Somewhere in Asaba/Onistha which is an even bigger Nollywood movie market, the marketers are taking the issue seriously by coming together to seek a solution on how to curb the influence of this “Internet Movie” sensation or should I say craze that has affected the market overwhelmingly.

I don’t know what the next step for them will be but with the decline of CD sales it looks like the market is helplessly sinking.

Culled: http://insideafrik..com.ng/2016/09/youtube-crashes-nollywood-market.html