Business
YouTube Opens the Road to New Online Business Models in Africa With Video Streaming
Video streaming will be the next big wave of online content use in Africa. There are still considerable network challenges but the level of existing use shows that once these issues are resolved, the volume of users will be in the millions.
Elijah Kitaka, a business developer at Google (Uganda), explained how it sees the potential of video streaming being realized.
YouTube is available in all countries in Africa but has been localized in a number of countries including: South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Uganda.
In one West Africa country with a local Google cache server, the amount of traffic through the local IXP is now 800 mbs and the majority of it is You Tube use.
So how does a country get to have a localized YouTube site? According to Kitaka: ”We need to sign an agreement with a rights collection society for authors, publishers and composers. Typically one body plays that role and it deals not just with local rights collection but also works on behalf of global rights holders.”
Once that important formality is dealt with, YouTube looks at levels of existing use and the number of potential content publishers to determine the level of interest. ”There’s still a lot of pain on the infrastructure side but this pain should reduce. Access and the cost of access is still really a barrier. But YouTube can play a key role in Africanizing the web”. Google has installed local cache servers in 4 countries and neighboring countries can take advantage of their presence.
In addition, the YouTube Feather feature allows users with much lower bandwidth access to watch a lower resolution version:”Feather will make these settings static and deactivate the fancy features. With optimization, a stream should run properly even with low bandwidth.”
