Nollywood Launches on Amazon and iTunes

Black Speech Media Group, a multimedia entertainment company, in conjunction with Autonomous Entertainment, a New York-based media marketing and distribution boutique, have brought Nigerian films to the digital distribution space by launching Nollywood movies on two major digital platforms, Amazon and iTunes.

With more than 50,000 Nollywood titles on the Black Speech Media Group platform, the two companies proposed a plan that would build a landing page and digital channel on most of the major digital platforms, such as iTunes, Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu. The first batch of titles are available on Amazon Prime and iTunes and have already gone live in six territories: USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia.

Nollywood is now the second largest film industry in the world. In number of annual film productions, it is ahead of the United States and behind only Indian cinema (Bollywood).

"iTunes was the first to help us establish a digital presence for Nollywood, a genre that didn't exist on any of the major digital platforms," says Autonomous Entertainment CEO Cedric Beasley.

"Now that we have established Nollywood as a genre with iTunes and Amazon, we are negotiating the addition of this genre across other platforms, such as Hulu, Xbox, Verizon/Redbox, Sony PlayStation, etc." added Timothy Kublenu, CEO of Black Speech Media Group. "It is our hope that our company will serve as a conduit whereby more producers and film makers can easily make available their films to a larger and global audience."

Source: Biz Community