IN CONVERSATION
|
THE CHANNEL
Far left
Channels TV is
building seven
new studios for
producing content
for African
audiences
In a world where American and
European content is the
dominating force, what is it like
producing Nigerian content? And
how has producing Nigerian
content changed over the years?
For us at Channels, we have a
different experience. We started out
as a news organisation, and so we
had to produce our own content.
About 90% of our content was
produced by us. Then we started
commissioning programmes, so
everything is local. And that’s the
kind of strategy that we’re
employing, because people identify
more with local content.
I think the landscape is
changing. More people are now
interested in seeing their own
images - how they are reflected in
the media, what goes on around
them, and how that translates into
pictures.
For the DTH service we’re
providing we will have some
stations that are foreign, but largely
we would like to have local
channels. We want to develop that
industry. That’s why we are now
building seven studios to help us
with this objective.
How does digital and social media
fit into Channels’ programming?
We’ve jumped at it and embraced
it. We have a lot to show for it as
well. We have the largest viewing
in Nigeria with our YouTube
channel. Recently Google gave us
an award getting 100,000 installs of
our applications. So many people
have downloaded our applications
across Nigeria and other parts of
the world.
We’re using Skype and Facebook
to a larger extent – all the forms of
digital media we use in our
programmes. With Skype, for
instance, because we have the
bandwidth to use, we’re able to talk
to anybody in the world and it
comes out cheaper than paying for
satellite feeds.
What we have done is not to try
to compete with social media, but
to embrace it and use it to our
advantage, and it’s working well.
What is coming up next?
We are looking at the African
continent, trying to see how we can
have some kind of a pan-African
service. We have a strategy – which
we’re keeping close to our chest – to
see that people enjoy news around
the continent as it’s reported.
We want to be a one-stop shop in
Nigeria, but to reach out to
different parts of the world. So
we’re creating bureaux now. We
signed an agreement for a
Washington bureau just a few days
back. We have a bureau in South
Africa. We’re trying to get one in
New York. We have a bureau in
London already. We’ll be getting
one in Asia, in India, and possibly
in China in the near future.
Once we get the UK channel up
and running, we’ll want to gravitate
toward the United States and
possibly Brazil. These are things we
want to do between now and 2017.
Channels’ vision is for us to
build a commercially viable media
conglomerate, which will build
purposeful and lasting ties among
Africans and people of African
descent. We want to try to reach
Africans of the diaspora all over the
world and try to give them content
that will relate to them. We’re
trying to close that void that has
existed for a long time.
Thank you, John Momoh.
Above left
Broadcasting
Board of
Governors Matt
Armstrong signs
agreement with
Channels TV for
VoA TV news
reports to be
carried on
Channels TV
Right Channels
TV was host
broadcaster for
the WEF Africa
2014
THE CHANNEL
|
ISSUE 1 2015
|
19
