Orange in Africa: “Local content boosts usage growth.”

 

IP&TV News finds out more about Orange’s African strategy from Orange’s Sebastien Crozier…

IP&TV News: Could you give us an overview of Orange’s African content strategy, first of all in countries where it’s currently a mass market operator?

Sebastien Crozier: Orange is rolling out its 3G and 4G networks that allow internet access and data services to mass consumers.

Content such as music and video are naturally favoured axes of development. Orange hence launched 2 key services in this area:

1: Orange Radio offers an aggregation of more than 20,000 radios available in mobility with a large footprint. The service is interconnected with Deezer and will be integrated part of fixed and mobile packages proposed by many Orange affiliates.

2: Orange Video by Dailymotion offers a video streaming service that is largely available. A dedicated and localized service has been developed in collaboration with the affiliates in Ivory Coast, Senegal, Madagascar, Maurice, Reunion as well as in the Caribbean’s. Local content strongly contributes to boost usage growth.

And what about those in which it isn’t a mass market operator?

Orange is putting an important emphasis in a few priority countries such as South Africa and Algeria where these two same services will be strongly localized.

Orange content services are diffused by other telecom operators especially over aDSL.

What do you think the main challenges will be for African content diffusion over the next year?

We identify four main challenges for African content services development over the next years:

1. Providing high quality internet services requires significant bandwidth increase and hence an increase of the internet interconnection capacities provided by sub-marine cables. Orange is putting a strong emphasis on this development through its international wholesale divisions.

2. In order to provide the overall continent with sufficient network capabilities, a high-speed fibre terrestrial network needs as well to be further deployed.

3. Datacenter number and capacity increase is a third important stake. Orange strongly contributes to such development in countries where it is as a mass-market operator.

4. African countries must lastly continue increasing their content production. Countries such as Nigeria, Egypt or South Africa already create an important volume of local content.

You’ll be at this year’s AfricaCast – why do you think this event has become so important so quickly?

3G and 4G network deployments create new needs and new stakes. Content services have become one of the major stakes for the telecom industry and more globally for the ICT sector in Africa.

An event such as the AfricaCast has hence become one of the unavoidable meetings in the high-tech area.

Sebastien Crozier will be appearing at next month’s AfricaCast, Africa’s premier show on the future of broadcasting, which takes place on the 11th-13th November 2014 at the Cape Town Convention Centre, South Africa. AfricaCast will be co-located with AfricaCom - for more information and to book, click here.