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Comment by vezycash | Hacker News Reader

Summary: Hosting videos is expensive. Especially when there is no revenue. The founder is Nigerian and I'm assuming the initial market was Nigeria where most people still prefer cash, face to face payment to credit/debit card payments. The fact that the largest eCommerce site in the country still has pay on delivery speaks volumes.

As said in the article, if they'd used Youtube as their host for videos, cost would have dropped dramatically and they could have survived for much longer, even become profitable with just sidebar ads.

If the founder is reading this, I recommend, trying again but this time, as a community and curation service for short films. Experiment with membership fees as a social network for film makers. And copy the Jiji model for prominent placement of videos on the site.

Business is a marathon, a survival game until you figure out income.

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This is already done and making money. www.irokotv.com

I did try to build an African Netflix in 2004 before streaming when it was all about shipping discs. It didn't pan out for me back then because most movies were VCDs and not DVDs and most people outside of the US's DVD players didn't necessarily play VCD. There was also a supply issue in regards to acquiring non pirated and good quality movies.

I guess you were faster than time itself.. lol. All your challenges are almost non existence today. Our only challenge then was internet speed which is still a challenge Ironically but generally, it's a better environment today even though it's an over-saturated industry.

You deserve a medal my friend! Thank you for the analysis and suggestion. You are right about the fact that YouTube would have been a life saver for us.

Building a VOD platform is a very expensive venture indeed and I am most likely not going to try to build another one again.. lol but I will take your advice under consideration on building a community and Curation service for short filmmakers. As a matter of fact, because of the mild success of my current venture (festivilia.com) we are already thinking towards something similar. Perherps in the nearest future but right now, we are solely dedicated to helping filmmakers get the best from their films through effective festival distribution.

Thank you so much for your suggestion. Business is indeed a marathon. My advice to any wannapreneur is that, if your idea can't generate revenue from the word go, and you don't have a ton of ready cash in the bank, you better rethink and remodel before launching. This is what Hubrif taught me and I used that lesson to fastrack festivilia into a profit making venture today.

Doesn’t Flipkart still have pay on delivery too?

I think anything in Japan has pay on delivery as well.

In Poland pay on delivery is still insanely popular and every single delivery company offers it as a payment method. Even international conglomerates like DHL/DPD/UPS will happily accept payment on delivery.

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