Abstract
This article examines how streaming is altering established viewing practices that traditionally characterised video film consumption among domestic Nigerians. Following the creation of the Nigerian video industry (Nollywood) as a straight-to-video film industry, audiences watched movies solely through the technologies of television sets and video players. The fluid and opaque circulation of video copies located audience consumption practices within informal realms and communal spaces. This article analyses how streaming is catalysing a distinctive viewing culture in Nigeria. It argues that streaming is formalising access to Nollywood movies, upending the communal practices associated with legacy video viewing, and fostering an individualised viewing culture though some informal communal practices persist in the streaming ecosystem. By emphasising the role of smartphones and apps in the emergent streaming culture, this article demonstrates how streaming is restructuring the temporal, spatial, and affective features of audience engagements that traditionally characterised movies viewing in Nigeria.
Growing up in Ado Ekiti, a major community in the south-western part of Nigeria in the late 1990s, it was common for my father to assemble the family for our routine moonlight stories in the open space in our backyard where he would sit on his favourite wooden chair. All the younger ones, including me, would excitedly look forward to the evening as we eagerly anticipated legendary stories about our hometown, including fictions about the shrewdness of tortoise, which was understood to be the trickiest of all animals. In most of those stories, the tortoise would cause problems for himself in a bid to ‘cut corners’. One particular night, my father told us the story of the gluttonous tortoise who heard of a birds-only feast to be held in the sky. Knowing that he was unable to fly, the tortoise got the services of a friend to attach fake wings on his body through which he flew to the sky. On getting to the feast, all the birds were surprised to see him and hailed his brilliance. However, the tortoise outdid himself by consuming so much food and alcohol that he became too drunk and plucked off his feathers. By the time he realised the consequence, all the birds had flown away leaving only the tortoise in the sky. Confused, the tortoise fell to the ground shattering his beautiful shell. Though he eventually got help in fixing the shell, it was never as beautiful as they used to be. Such moral-laden storylines were often mixed with laughter, suspense, and sometimes sadness. Everyone usually left such gatherings with a warning never to be like the tortoise.
Before the mid-2000s, similar experiences were common in many homes in Nigeria. Diverse communities in Nigeria had deep-rooted oral traditions of storytelling. Such practices persisted through the 20th century as television was affordable to only a privileged few until the end of the century. Oral storytelling continued to be the readily available mode of entertainment for thousands of households that could not afford a television set, while those who had sets reproduced the communal nature of oral storytelling and shared viewing remained an experience everyone looked forward to nightly. Instead of sitting around an elder, the younger ones would sneak into neighbours’ sitting rooms to watch video films mostly produced by Nigerian filmmakers. There were also many pirated Hollywood, Bollywood, and Hong Kong films available in homes.
The shift from the oral tradition of storytelling to video-mediated visual narrative changed the mode of access and the protocols of cultural consumption, but it did not significantly hamper the communalistic ideals that characterised oral storytelling. Mostly, films were watched in households in a family setting with almost every member of the family present, enabling conversations and arguments around the content of the film. Due to these dynamics, Nollywood films, which had become the most common local cultural form in Nigeria by the early 2000s, were known as ‘home videos’, based on the notion that they were mostly viewed in living rooms where families and friends would generally comment about the social issues mediated in the films (Barrot, 2009; Haynes, 2016).
Quite significantly, the communal nature of video consumption also extended into how film copies were informally circulated among families, friends, and households. Many households rarely bought video copies in those days. Instead, families passed newly released films to other families to watch for free. Such household-to-household practices contributed immensely to the popularity of Nigerian films among the domestic audiences (Larkin, 2008; Lobato, 2010).
In the later part of the 2000s, digital distribution of films became a minor part of the video consumption culture of Nigerians, especially among younger demographics. Around this time, a few pirate websites and YouTube channels emerged that provided access to uploaded fragmented clips of Nigerian films online (Lobato, 2012). Smartphone penetration also became considerable in Nigeria. These smartphones were mostly second-hand products shipped from abroad and cheaply available in local bazaars. By 2010, streaming started to look promising in Nigeria as iROKOtv emerged – the first service for Nigerian films. It briefly operated as a YouTube channel before transforming into a stand-alone freemium service in 2011. In 2014, it became a full-fledged subscription service.
Much has changed since 2010. As of 2022, the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) reports that internet penetration rate has moved from about 11% of the population recorded in 2010 and now stands at 44.30%. 1 Also, smartphone adoption, which was around 5% in the 2000s, is now up to about 20% and is anticipated to increase to 60% by 2025. 2 Though details of actual internet use remain poorly recorded, more Nigerians, especially the younger demographics are adopting streaming for film consumption. 3 Accordingly, more than 10 streaming services have launched in Nigeria within the past decade, with the majority launching in the past five years.
This article builds on the historical trajectory of video consumption in Nigeria to examine how streaming reconfigures movie-viewing experiences among Nigerians. It argues that streaming has shifted video consumption in Nigeria towards a more formalised and individualised mode of reception, departing from the existing heavily informal and communal patterns of video viewing. It illuminates the ambivalence of these dynamics: although streaming is formalising audiences’ access to Nollywood movies and reconfiguring the temporal and spatial features of audience engagements, it also perpetuates specific informal and communal practices, albeit in remediated forms. These dynamics of streaming in Nigeria diverge from the culture of oral storytelling that traditionally characterised Nigerian communities and the video-based ‘family viewing’ movie consumption practices that became prominent around the 1990s. The article further argues these dynamics position streaming as a particular cultural practice with structural elements that enable certain kinds of consumption cultures that shape the conduct of audiences according to distinctive technological and economic logics. This article contributes to scholarship on how streaming shapes existing video cultures around the world by putting the experience of Nigerian audiences in a global and comparative context.
Nigeria's legacy viewing culture: domestic audiences and small screens
Movie viewing emerged as a significant domestic practice in Nigeria during the oil boom in the 1970s. Prior to this time, the oral tradition of storytelling was the norm in communities across Nigeria, where households gathered in groups to share stories (Juma, 2022). However, Nigeria had a stint of economic prosperity in the 1970 s due to the increase in the global price of crude oil, the mainstay of the nation's economy. The economic prosperity coincided with the liberalisation of international trade, which enabled the importation of home electronics from developed nations to Africa, often through alternative networks of international trade that facilitated the importation of second-hand products, including television sets and video players (Jedlowski, 2017; Miller, 2016). Lagos became one of the foremost hubs of these unofficial trade relations, offering cheap television sets and video players as many Nigerian businessmen ventured into importation of empty video cassettes and VCR players, relying on the complex web of informal international trade outside the official purview of international trade laws, and regulations and accounting (Lobato, 2010).
Nigeria soon became saturated with videocassette recorders – it had more than in any other country in Africa (Haynes, 2016). As of 1984, approximately 20% of television set owners reported owning VCRs (video players). Though this was a modest figure when compared globally, there was a huge importation of video cameras and empty VHS tapes to service the video players available to local audiences. A new business of ‘social video’ production subsequently emerged. This entailed recording and circulating popular social events, such as weddings, burials, and chieftaincy ceremonies, among families, friends, and well-wishers (Haynes, 2016).
As video consumption became more popular among Nigerians, the businessmen who initially focused on importing empty VHS tapes and video recorders dabbled in importation and piracy of Hollywood, Hong Kong, and Bollywood films (Larkin, 2008). A notable feature of the VHS-based video culture in the early 1990s was the scarcity of local content on screens. Foreign films dominated VHS players in homes while television stations could not fund local productions due to Nigeria's economic problems. 4 A solution materialised in 1992, when Kenneth Nnebue, an importer of videocassettes, shipped some empty cassettes from Taiwan but was unable to sell them. He decided to experiment with recording local content on the empty cassettes and produced Living in Bondage, which is reputed to have pioneered Nollywood video films (Arewa, 2017; Okome, 2019). The movie sold over a million copies through informal distribution using video vendors (Bright, 2015). Spurred by the sales, many private businessmen ventured into film production and the industry developed over time.
Living in Bondage aptly represents the emergence of Nollywood as a product of social, economic, and technological factors, showing how Nollywood developed in response to audience desires and Nigeria's particular conditions. Nollywood's emergence coincided with an increase in high crime rates in Nigeria caused by the persistent downturn of the Nigerian economy. 5 The general sense of insecurity led people to avoid going out at night. Instead, they stayed at home with family members to watch movies together (Esonwanne, 2008; Haynes, 2007). The preference for in-home video consumption by domestic audiences shaped Nollywood's development as a straight-to-video industry that produced videos meant for consumption on the small screens of television sets. The emergence of a viewing culture tied to these particular conditions produced consequences for the viewing culture associated with the legacy video era.
Home video: informality and communal viewing dynamics
Video viewing has remained a key practice among Nollywood movie audiences in Nigeria since the 1990s. This is because most Nigerians still lack access to streaming as a result of economic and infrastructural complications. In contrast, video copies are cheaply and readily accessible in the remotest of communities. The Nigerian population is approximately 200 million and there are about five members in a household, 6 suggesting that there are around 43 million households in Nigeria. About one quarter of the population has access to TV (analogue and cable) and the access dynamics are shaped by the rural–urban divide. More precisely, local elites and working-class audiences in urban areas are the key users of streaming and cable services, while those in rural areas continue to use the traditional video system. Cable channels such as Africa Magic, ROKtv, Ebonylifetv, and Trybetv provide access to a wide range of Nollywood films for urban users who can afford the average US$6 monthly subscription fee. 7 In a May 5, 2021 report by This Day, 8 the number of households using cable services in Nigeria is expected to increase from 6.5 million in 2018 to 7.4 million in 2023. Additionally, a 2018 report by All Africa reveals that about 10 million Nigerian homes still run analogue televisions. 9 This category of people mostly dwell in rural communities and adopt the traditional mode of video distribution as their primary access to movies.
A key component of the traditional video viewing culture is the pre-eminence of informal consumption practices among the audiences. This reflects the video distribution system in which video reproduction and circulation exist outside the official realms of government oversight and documentation (Miller, 2016; Simon, 2022a). Access protocols for audiences in the video market also align with the broader informality of the system. To get a VCD/DVD copy, a consumer must leave their homes to select a title at a nearby store where they have limited title options or a from major hub – such as a market – to access a diversity of title options. Consumers generally have access to a range of movie genres due to the abundance of titles in the video market (Haynes, 2016; Novia, 2012). These genres include ritual films, family films, village films, and royal films developed within the industry based on constantly repeated themes and storylines (Haynes, 2016). Nollywood video film producers continue to produce over 50 films a week, giving audiences a plethora of films and genres to choose from. Once viewers select films, they pay in cash, which makes payments difficult to track in official banking records or industry estimates. Such a pattern of informal industry–audience relations has complicated the challenge of metrics in Nollywood as many available data are speculative (Miller, 2020).
The home video viewing experience is characterised by a communal and participatory culture as it is a norm for the entire family to watch videos together after dinner and discuss key lessons learnt in the films. Apart from the entertainment elements of family viewing, it is also seen as an opportunity for families to bond together and resolve inherent conflicts. It is common for religious leaders to admonish couples to try to watch movies together as a means of ‘oiling the frictions’ of marriage. These sermons represent a religious dimension of the communal viewing habit of home videos, as preachers sometimes attribute long abstinence from family viewing as a potential sign of a ‘satanic attack’ on homes.
In addition to the communal domestic viewing, informal communal public screening is also common. Within Nigeria, there are hundreds of video clubs in remote communities that provide informal access to video films. As Lobato (2012: 58) explains, a video club is ‘simply a room with a TV, some benches and an electric generator, maybe decorated with movie posters, where videos are shown to crowds of locals every couple of hours’. Video clubs primarily serve those who cannot afford television sets and video players in their homes and seek to watch Nollywood films. Haynes provides an apt description of this scenario: ‘Street corners’ and video parlours provide alternatives to the orthodox space of cinematic spectatorship. While they announce the material poverty of … [their] audiences, these venues are open and the debates that go on in them are unfettered, unrestrained, and sometimes very vociferous…. It is the possibilities that popular video films provide as a way of escape and as a platform for critical judgment on social conditions that recommend the massive patronage, which Nollywood enjoys in these sites of seeing. (2007: 18)
In some instances, the video stores also feature people who have video players in their homes but enjoy the communal nature of video stores especially the commentary and debate that develops from shared viewing. Entry costs less than 25 cents, making it affordable for an average person. Audiences at video parlours are mostly adult men because parents rarely allow their children to go to places where they could see adults smoking and drinking alcohol. Similarly, cultural norms do not support single and married women mingling with men at such places. The notion is that ‘decent’ women should value their privacy and limit public interactions with men, especially in unstructured places like a video parlour. Such gendered spectatorship is more strongly enforced in the northern part of Nigeria due to stricter religious observance. Men often move around freely while women are rarely seen in public entertainment places. Apart from video parlours, videos are also screened at open marketplaces, bars, hairdressing shops, and other local stores, day and night, and many viewers are willing to stand around to watch Nollywood films in these free venues. This norm of public spectatorship is a defining feature of Nigerian viewing culture in the video-based system.
The ‘home video’ dynamics of consumption also enable parental mediation of content for teenagers under 18 by monitoring the rating of the video films bought or rented for the family. On occasion, teenagers might cunningly watch ‘prohibited’ films in the absence of their parents and there have been instances when the power supply has dropped while some teenagers have been watching prohibited films, only to be caught by their parents when power was restored, earning punishment strong enough to deter them from repeating such an act.
Shared viewing, either in the home or in public, was fundamental to the Nigerian home video viewing culture. However, the arrival of streaming has brought changes. Most of the informal and communal practices that characterise video film viewing are being disrupted by streaming, while the logics of streaming and its technological innovations introduce new modes of communal practice.
Streaming infrastructure, user mobility, and formalisation of access
At an industrial level, the infrastructural and economic logics of streaming are formalising practices of movie consumption. Formalisation ushers in novel movie-viewing protocols, such as paying subscription fees, using internet connections, and watching via mobile devices. It also introduces new challenges for Nigerians, who remain largely disconnected from the new consumption space due to their inability to navigate the access protocols.
The reputation of Nollywood productions and the audiences they draw were central to how streaming has developed in Nigeria. When YouTube launched in 2006, Nollywood audiences both in Nigeria and overseas created multiple YouTube channels that provided unrestricted and free access to clips of popular Nollywood films. Nigerians in the diaspora, exploring the new opportunity for on-demand access to Nigerian titles, composed a significant share of the Nollywood YouTube audience, while domestic Nigerians could also watch short clips on YouTube and pirate sites as this did not require much mobile data. Continuing informal norms, Nollywood audiences in Nigeria and overseas also created personal websites through which they illegally uploaded clips of Nollywood films for free access. These informally uploaded films generated millions of views and provided the first verifiable statistics about audience engagement with Nollywood films. Though the uploads were not authorised by filmmakers or video distributors, they were not concerned by the fan uploads, partly due to decades of informal norms in distribution. The wide popularity of those illegally uploaded clips among Nollywood fans across the world provided insight regarding the likely success of streaming as a mode of distribution.
Eventually, Jason Njoku, a Nollywood fan who lived in Manchester, United Kingdom, noticed the appetite of Africans in the diaspora for Nollywood films and provided a solution to the slow arrival of video copies shipped abroad. He capitalised on the introduction of the YouTube Partnership Program in 2007 that enabled content creators to earn revenue from YouTube. In 2010, Njoku leveraged the economic formalisation of YouTube to launch the Nollywoodlove channel, which was renamed iROKOtv after a few months. It was the first YouTube channel with films licensed from producers (Jewell, 2017; Miller, 2016). In less than a year, the channel attracted more than a million views from more than 200 countries, including Nigeria. Based on its success on YouTube, iROKOtv evolved in 2014 to become the first subscription video on-demand (VOD) service for Nollywood films (Adejunmobi, 2019; Thakkar, 2015). Ibakatv became the second Nigerian streaming service to debut in 2011, and from 2015 onward, more than 10 streaming portals have launched, and Nigerian YouTube channels continue to proliferate (Simon, 2022b).
The expansion of smartphone accessibility further increased adoption of streaming in Nigeria and allowed more people, especially those in the middle and upper classes, to access streamed content, despite a weak wired internet infrastructure. However, many Nigerians are still disconnected from streaming because they cannot afford internet and streaming subscription costs. Also, many are not culturally disposed to paying for entertainment content due to the informal dynamics that have historically shaped access, or are uncomfortable providing debit card details for online commerce. All of these factors complicate streaming operations in Africa (Adejunmobi, 2019; Dovey, 2018). However, Africa is still regarded as a growth market, with analysts forecasting that the continent will be the source of the next billion digital video consumers. The 2022 report of Digital TV Research predicted that there would attain be 13.72 million SVOD subscriptions in Africa by 2027, up from 4.89 million at the end of 2021. 10 Streaming executives are hopeful of such growth and recognise the need to enter the market, although it remains in early stages (Miller, 2021; Simon, 2022b).
Streaming in Nigeria is, however, becoming progressively more popular, especially in urban communities. As of 2022, streaming users in Nigeria are speculated to be around 15% of the 200 million Nigerian population and forecasts predict an increase to around 22% by 2027 (New Telegraph, 2022). Nevertheless, there are disparities in the streaming experiences between the elites and non-elites in the urban areas. On the one hand, the elites, who are financially buoyant, use premium services like Netflix, iROKOtv, and Amazon Prime Video. They live in much more developed areas where the internet connection is more stable, giving a seamless viewing experience. On the other hand, the non-elite urban residents mostly rely on YouTube and often partake in filesharing practices analysed below. These users live in peripheral locations of urban communities, and they share some similarity with those in local regions in terms of poor internet connection and economic incapacity.
The rural–urban divide is notably impacting the pattern of streaming adoption and video consumption culture in Nigeria. Netflix is estimated to have about 50,000 subscribers in Nigeria (TechPoint Africa, 2019), while executives at local streaming portals such as iROKOtv and Ibakatv confirmed that resident Nigerians are increasingly using their services thanks to innovative strategies such as subscription price reduction (Simon, 2021). While paid services struggle to attract Nigerian users, YouTube channel owners often boast that they ‘own’ the streaming space in Nigeria as more Nigerians adopt YouTube to access video content. This is mainly because YouTube spectatorship is cheaper; although it requires internet connection and mobile data, there is no additional subscription cost. As of 2023, YouTube has over 8 million users in Nigeria and the number is projected to reach 11 million by 2025. 11 This development has allowed for a considerable amount of Nigerian short-form video content to be available on YouTube, and not just content created by filmmakers. These dynamics illustrate how specific zones of consumption shape the cultural experiences of media audiences, including what streaming means for users in specific national and cultural environments (Arora, 2019; Lobato, 2019; Lotz et al., 2018). For instance, Lotz et al. (2018: 38) argue that ‘internet-distributed television depends on where you are’, while Arora's (2019) work underscores how infrastructural and economic challenges complicate digital access in some parts of the Global South.
The strong connection of streaming with smartphone use in Nigeria is engendering unique patterns of spectatorship that contrast with the legacy video viewing culture. In this dynamic, smartphones and mobile apps are replacing video technologies (video players and video discs) that were characteristic of home video norms. It is worth noting that phones using the Android operating system are the most used devices for streaming in Nigeria. This is because they are cheaply available in electronics stores and local bazaars. Few people have the disposable income to purchase smart televisions or can afford the high broadband rate needed for smart TV viewing. Also, few people can afford IOS-operated phones or iPads for film viewing. However, Android-operated phones are mostly affordable. Without mobile apps on Android-operated phones, film consumption via streaming would be much less accessible to Nigerians.
This contrasts with the more developed contexts of the Global North, where apps are much more integrated into the audiences’ experience via mobile technologies and smart TVs, to the extent that they are seen as a form of ‘mundane software’ (Morris and Elkins, 2015: 65), and as such their role in contemporary media ecosystems is commonly overlooked (Johnson, 2020). The situation is different among streaming users in Nigeria, where the adoption of Android-operated apps reflects the infrastructural inadequacies in Nigeria, where it is largely impracticable to access digital libraries on diverse streaming services and multiple devices anywhere and anytime, an ability described as platform mobility by Western scholars (Tryon, 2013). Instead, most domestic audiences in Nigeria experience ‘socio-spatial user mobility’ enabled by mobile apps and the internet. This requires people to move from areas of weak or non-existent internet connections to areas of strong internet connections to facilitate the downloading content for offline viewing. ‘Mobile’ smartphones aren’t as mobile as is assumed in Western discussions. Reflecting the manifestation of social inequality in spatial patterns, socio-spatial user mobility has become a cultural practice enabled by apps that facilitate downloading.
Unlike the idea of platform mobility, where users can determine and control what they want to watch ‘on demand’, socio-spatial user mobility requires delayed gratification and reduced agency on the part of viewers. The idea of ‘on demand’ is nuanced in this context, as the practice of socio-spatial user mobility shares some similarity with obtaining titles in the video market and audiences moving from their homes to video stores to purchase video copies. Many users who are unable to successfully download films due to internet inaccessibility also use mobile kiosks provided by services such as iROKOtv. 12 Another strategy is night streaming and downloading as internet connection is more stable at night compared to daytime. Thus, some users wake in the middle of the night to download films for later viewing. Reflecting the scale of this practice, YouTube has a special partnership with telecom services that includes gifting users with free MB that can only be used between 12 a.m. and 5 a.m. after purchasing certain airtime plans. These developments underscore the variability of mobility and on-demand access as affordances of streaming and illustrate practices likely unimagined by Western viewers.
Nigerians’ use of streaming is also shaped by the need to constantly purchase mobile data at a cost of up to US$1 per gigabyte, a cost that also shapes what and how they watch. Many streaming users complain that data pricing often pushes them to avoid subscription for several months. Users also vary the quality of the video to reduce data use. The iROKOtv app offers ‘Download High Quality’ and ‘Data saver’ options. For instance, when I wanted to watch Love Duty (2020), a feature film on the iROKOtv app, the ‘High Quality’ version was 337MB while the ‘Data Saver’ version was 108MB. Similarly, Ibakatv allows downloads categorised as ‘High’, ‘Medium’, and ‘Low’ to vary the download file size. Apart from the reduced data and implied reduced cost for domestic users, low MB films complete downloading faster than high MB films. Picture quality also differs. High MB films appear clearer than those with lower MBs, which can be blurry. However, due to the desire to conserve mobile data, streaming audiences prefer blurred images as the ‘sacrifice’ for less data use. These dynamics further demonstrate practices rarely practised in more developed contexts where discourses about choice in the context of streaming are often placed within the tensions of choice fatigue caused by abundance of streaming content vis-à-vis the role of algorithmic recommendations in mediating consumer choices (Smits and Nikdel, 2019).
The use of paid streaming services also introduces a ‘trust leap’ that was never prominent in the legacy video system. Streaming audiences often discuss their relationship with streamers as a form of risk, requiring that they trust services with their banking details and credit cards in a context where internet scams are common. Many users negotiate this by adopting ‘piecemeal trusting’ as part of their streaming practices. For instance, users open unique bank accounts and deposit a modest sum to pay for streaming to test whether scammers tamper with the bank account and to minimise the loss if so. Services such as iROKOtv, Ibakatv, and Nevadabridgetv have also established ongoing partnerships with local banks to enable direct bank payment. Users who are sceptical of using their debit cards online can go to a physical location of any of the partner banks and directly pay subscription fees.
Another notable consequence of streaming may be more significant for industry than viewers at first glance, but will likely have implications for viewers in time. Relying on apps is formalising video distribution and consumption in comparison with the situation in the legacy video distribution system, where much of the viewing and money spent in the sector could not be tracked. The formalisation of payments via debit card or third-party payment companies contrasts with the off-the-books transactions in the video distribution system. Precise metrics of viewing will likely shape the content services such as iROKOtv invest in and will guide aspiring creators.
Pocket video: fragmented audiences and individualised viewing
Despite the technological and economic challenges Nigerian viewers face, streaming video is being strongly adopted and changing key practices of how and where they view films. Three particularly notable changes are: the personalisation of viewing and related audience fragmentation across a much greater array of video choice; the spatial change from home viewing and specific public venues to private mobile viewing; and the adoption of more distracted viewing practices. Amidst this change, we also have continuity in a variety of informal practices.
One factor that aided the norm of a communal home video viewing culture was that Nollywood video films were produced for a mass, diverse Nigerian audience. Haynes (2019) succinctly describes these video films as a form of African popular arts – a commerce-driven, grassroots phenomenon expressing the consciousness of a heterogeneous, non-elite public. Traditional video distributors understood their audiences broadly as Nigerians and Africans who love Nollywood films. There was little consideration of producing for a specific age range, social class, or gender (Simon, 2022b). Though there was a general assumption that full-time housewives were the heaviest consumers of Nollywood films (Ukata, 2010), films were not primarily targeted at women. Because Nollywood producers knew little of their viewers, they formed discursive constructions of the audiences to guide their production practices in a manner consistent with how Ang (1991) describes the audience as an ‘invisible mass’. In the video-based Nollywood, the assumption that women were the primary viewers has no verifiable statistical backing. Instead, it was based on the discursive assumptions of the traditional video distributors.
In the age of streaming, Nollywood audiences have fragmented along economic and demographic lines. The video market still operates in Africa, but it continues to service mostly those who are not economically and technologically privileged to access streaming services. Subscription services are mainly adopted by Nigerians, mostly young adults, who can afford the subscription fees in addition to the internet cost. YouTube is also part of the Nigerian streaming ecosystem and is mostly used by Nigerian young adults who lack the economic means to subscribe to premium services. The fragmentation dynamics also impact the amount of content available to users on specific services. Due to the algorithm-mediated content acquisition strategies of subscription services, content is less diverse compared to YouTube (Simon, 2023). YouTube mirrors the legacy video system in that its offerings include a wide variety of movie genres. Subscription services license films based on insights from viewers’ data, but YouTube is open to content from diverse movie producers who produce for a broad audience to get the highest views possible. Notably, subscription services audiences often decry the lack of diversity in the libraries. Many of them satisfy their viewing desire by watching more content free on YouTube. Despite the generic limitations of subscription services, users continue to adopt them due to the improved technical quality of production compared to YouTube, where the films are largely characterised by low production values.
Another way in which streaming has fundamentally altered viewing experiences is by individualising viewing culture. Unlike the video-based viewing experience characterised by a communal and participatory culture, streaming audiences don’t watch films in groups or in a family setting due to the small screens of smartphones and apps that mediate access. Instead, people watch individually on their smartphones, with little or no in-person social interactions. As is common in many places around the world, Nigerian streaming audiences also watch films in their bedrooms, on the bus, and during lunch breaks at work. In his foundational work on television as a technological and cultural form, Williams (1974) developed the concept of private mobilisation to explain how television audiences access televised content and participate in distant events from the comfort of their private spaces. Extending this debate, Spigel (2001) introduced the idea of privatised mobility to reflect the evolution of TV from a static home-based technology to a mobile technology which enables private spectatorship in public spaces. Privatised mobility reverses mobile privatisation in that ‘rather than incorporating views of the outdoor into the home, now television promised to bring the interior world outside’ (Spigel, 2001: 71). Williams’ idea of mobile privatisation remains relevant in the contemporary media ecosystem, especially in the age of increased social media participation and streaming. Individuals and digitally intimate groups tend to downplay wider social engagements and become cocooned in their social bubbles and private worlds (Groening, 2013; McGuigan, 2013). In the streaming space, mobile privatisation and privatised mobility manifest through the diverse ways by which digital devices such as smart television and smartphones, as well as the internet, are engendering individualisation and personalisation of media consumption both in homes and public spaces (Maly-Bowie, 2019; Özgün and Treske, 2021; Steiner and Xu, 2018).
Of course a few streaming services enable commenting or other forms of interaction. Generally, these discussions radically depart from the more personal, communal, and interactive relationship that characterised the legacy video culture. The public spectatorship, such as in video clubs, and more general public viewing that was a defining feature of audience viewing experience in the video market also has no equivalent in the streaming ecosystem. Streaming audiences do not converge on street corners and in video parlours to watch and discuss streaming content. Instead, social media platforms, especially Twitter, have become the new public sphere where discussions and debates about streaming videos are held. Also, parental mediation, which is practicable in the legacy viewing culture, is complicated in the streaming ecosystem. Teenagers and adolescents are not actively monitored. Parents can only verbally advise their wards to avoid sensitive content. It is practically impossible for parents to know and control what is being watched and when. All these consequences are changing the viewing culture of Nigeria. These digital-era developments are not uncommon; however, the viewing culture within Nigeria was different from Western environments that had already fragmented significantly.
In Nigeria, the transition from home-based movie consumption to a more flexible streaming-based culture represents a shift from films as ‘home videos’ to films as ‘pocket videos’, which could be watched anytime as long as the content has been downloaded. To be clear, ‘pocket videos’ derives from mobility enabled by smartphones which users normally keep in their pockets. Privatised mobility emerges here in the sense that, even when streaming users are in public spaces, they are sometimes disconnected from their environment as they are immersed in their privatised video consumption on their mobile devices. By enabling movie consumption, which was traditionally a home culture, in public spaces, streaming challenges the cultural significance of ‘home’, reducing it to a contextual concept. Maly-Bowie's (2019: 216) assertion that ‘home is everywhere your Netflix is’ reflects how streaming is reshaping users’ perception of home and resulting in blurriness between public and private spaces in video consumption.
Nigerians’ relationship to video viewing also changes as a result of this pocket access. Streaming users can freely multi-task while streaming films. They do not see any reason to sit and watch films as in the past. A common discourse is that Nollywood films are more dialogue-based rather than visual-based, so that one can follow the storyline of a typical Nollywood film just by listening. Legacy video audiences also multi-task, but their movements are restricted depending on where TV sets are placed. However, with smartphones in the pocket and the ubiquity of wireless earphones, audiences do other personal tasks and move freely while ‘watching’ Nollywood films through their smartphones.
Some patterns of informal and communal practices extend into the streaming space. Globally, online piracy and filesharing remain a key component of the connected viewing culture of streaming (Crisp, 2015; Holt and Sanson, 2014). In Nigeria, they are reminiscent of the house-to-house, friend-to-friend video-sharing practices of the VCD system. Fan-constructed pirate sites that offer streaming films are ubiquitous. Examples include Netnaija, Naijapals, Naijaonpoint, Nkiri, and 9jarocks, among others. Most streaming films appear on these sites within 24 hours of their official release. Nollywood fans freely download films from these sites and share among themselves using smartphones (Amodu et al., 2020).
An emergent filesharing culture in Nigeria is the use of messaging apps, such as Telegram, to form communities of thousands of participants where videos and their pirate links are freely shared. Most of the videos shared in these communities are popular films on premium services such as Netflix and iROKOtv. YouTube films are rarely seen in these groups because free access already exists. These practices are reflections of the inability of potential consumers to access content on subscription services due to economic and infrastructural complications that have pushed many people to the informal side of streaming. For such viewers, piracy becomes a means of access. As Lobato (2012) notes, the ‘piracy as access’ theorisation explains how people adopt pirate networks and practices as an alternative form of media access where authorised access is not achievable. In Nigeria, the ubiquity of such practices reflects the conscious effort to consume media forms in the face of problematic formalised access networks. Internet pirates also tend to argue that they contribute to fandom by providing free access to audiences (Businessday, 2022). The supply and demand chain orchestrated by pirate sites and their users constitutes a parallel space of consumption that currently competes with its formal counterpart in the Nigerian streaming space.
Conclusion
The changing video culture of Nigeria presents a granular case for how streaming and its economic and infrastructural logics transform audiences’ viewing experiences in a particular context. The traditional mode of video consumption, built on informality and communal viewing, is being challenged by the comparatively formalised access protocols and individualised viewing culture that streaming via mobile phones engenders. Technological inventions such as smartphones and the internet are replacing video players and analogue TVs for streaming audiences.
A notable implication of these transformations is the formalisation of informal consumption practices. Access to films on streaming services goes through official banking systems and such transactions have official documentation. This diverts from previous practices where the buying and selling of video copies took place within informal realms with no direct intersection with the formal economy.
Of course, audience consumption patterns are being personalised and individualised in other contexts as well. However, the case of Nigeria illuminates how these changes mean different things for audiences in diverse places. Particularly, it unpacks the socio-economic and cultural significance of ‘place’ in shaping users’ experience of streaming and its associated disruptions to extant video consumption culture. For instance, in more developed contexts, where content consumption was already formalised across multiple distribution systems, streaming represents an added space of formal consumption practices. This contrasts with Nigeria, where streaming represents a unique formalised market coexisting with other formalised markets, such as cable television, as well as the inherently informal traditional video-based system providing an array of choices for different viewers.
The centrality of mobile apps and smartphones encourages more individualised experience in Nigeria, leading to the imaginary of films as ‘pocket videos’ among audiences. The communal culture of legacy ‘home video’ consumption and the practice of parental mediation have no prominence in streaming consumption. The particular characteristics of streaming in Nigeria reinforce specific distribution systems as unique spaces for certain cultural practices. As Lotz (2017: 3) observes, ‘a “medium” derives not only from technological capabilities, but also from … audience behaviors, and cultural understanding’. Streaming introduces logics that are often tempered by specific contextual realities. For instance, internet connectivity and subscription cost shut the door for certain audiences and admits others. In Nigeria, streaming is not for everyone. Only those who are well placed financially and geographically participate in the streaming space. Elements of subcultural practices are evident within the broader streaming ecosystem. Premium services are distinguished by high barriers to access, thereby enabling a few participants compared to YouTube, which has fewer access barriers. User experiences also differ based on the adopted service. Premium services provide exclusive content with minimal generic diversity, while YouTube provides a vast array of genres but with poor production values. All of these differences underscore the value in understanding streaming as a cultural practice that shapes the experience and expectations of users.
Viewer experiences in Nigeria also illustrate the socio-technicality of streaming infrastructure. Streaming infrastructures are critically relational as they often shape and are shaped by specific contextual realities rather than merely operating as technical hardware and software. Mobile apps currently dominate in the adoption of streaming in Nigeria and its reconfigurations of audience experiences. Mobile apps are not just a delivery system among local audiences but reflect the deep-rooted complications of streaming access, fuelled by the economic, technological, cultural, and infrastructural divides in Nigeria. While this contrasts with more developed economies, where multiple viewing devices are common and internet use is generally high (Johnson, 2020; Lotz, 2017), it resonates with similar experiences in developing countries where the adoption of mobile apps is strongly rooted in similar concerns (Lobato, 2019).
As streaming continues to develop in Nigeria, its cultural implications for audiences require continuous interrogation in scholarship. Future audience-based research could provide an empirical overview of other emergent cultural implications of streaming for Nigerians, such as users’ perception of SVODs’ libraries and the cultural roles of services’ original productions among Nigerians. Such conversations would contribute to existing debates around catalogues, content diversity, and cultural representations in the age of data-driven curation practices.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author biography
Godwin Iretomiwa Simon is a lecturer in the School of Communication and researcher at the Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He researches media industries, streaming media, and emergent platform economies with a focus on the Global South.