iROKO Partners is an online media distribution company focused on the Nigerian Entertainment Industry. The company was established in September 2010 and is headquartered in

Lagos Lagos (Nigerian English: ; ) is the largest city in Nigeria and the List of cities in Africa by population, second most populous city in Africa, with a population of 15.4 million as of 2015 within the city proper. Lagos was the national ca ...

, with a branch in

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

, United Kingdom. The company is led by its co-founders Jason Njoku (CEO) and Bastian Gotter along with major investor Nazar Yasin. iROKO Partners offers a range of online media products including its

movie streaming Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos without a traditional video playback device and the constraints of a typical static broadcasting schedule. In the 20th century, broadcasting in the form of o ...

website named

iROKOtv irokotv is a web platform that provides paid-for Nigerian films on-demand. It is one of Africa's first mainstream online movie streaming websites, providing access to over 5,000 Nollywood film titles. irokotv is a part of iROKO Limited, which ...

focused on Nollywood Film productions, and 'iROKING', a Nigerian music streaming platform. Other web brands are iROKtv, NollywoodLove and YorubaLove which operate on the YouTube video platform.

History

iROKO Partners was founded in 2010 in London, England by Jason Njoku and Bastian Gotter. The Idea was born out of the high and rapidly growing demand for Nollywood films. iROKO partners initially set out to rid both the

internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

and the industry from the vast amount of

piracy Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods. Those who conduct acts of piracy are called pirates, v ...

which was crippling the industry; once established, the organization birthed Nollywoodlove and Yorubalove, which obtained a dominant share of local YouTube views in 2011. Just four months into his business, Njoku had bought the online rights to 500 movies from 100 different one-man production houses. The company is globally the largest licensor and the leading distributor of Nollywood movies (both English and Yoruba) online.

Tiger Global Tiger Global Management, LLC (often referred to as Tiger Global and formerly known as Tiger Technology) is an American investment firm. It mainly focuses on Internet, software, consumer, and financial technology industries. Background and histo ...

, a hedge fund run by an early investor in

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

and

Zynga Zynga Inc. () is an American developer running social video game services. It was founded in April 2007, with headquarters in San Mateo, California. The company primarily focuses on mobile and social networking platforms. Zynga states its missio ...

, has invested $8 million into the company. iROKO Partners is now the fastest-growing internet company in Nigeria and is currently YouTube’s biggest African partner with distribution deals with Dailymotion, iTunes, Amazon and Vimeo.

iROKING

IROKING is a free Nigerian music streaming service offering streaming of selected music from a range of African labels and artists. Its website platform was launched in December 2011 by iROKO Partners. Music can be browsed by direct searches, artist, album and playlists. The system is currently accessible using Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

Mobile application

iROKING has also launched

mobile application A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on de ...

s for its music application on the

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

, Android, Windows and

Symbian Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system A mobile operating system is an operating system for mobile phones, tablets, smartwatches, smartglasses, or other non-laptop personal mobile computing devices. While computers such as typic ...

(Nokia) mobile handsets. The application allows access to thousand of the latest Nigerian tracks and stream songs over

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wave ...

or 3G. The iROKING mobile application's features include: * Favourite selected songs * Create

playlist A playlist is a list of video or audio files that can be played back on a media player either sequentially or in a shuffled order. In its most general form, an audio playlist is simply a list of songs, but sometimes a loop. The term has sever ...

s and share them via

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

* Integrated ‘offline’ functionality (users can listen to favourite tunes offline)

References

External links

*{{official website, http://iroko.ng/
iROKOtviROKING
*YouTube channel
iROKtv
Mass media companies of Nigeria Nigerian music Music software Mass media in Lagos Companies based in Lagos