Viewpoint: DISCOP Africa Opens in Dakar

DAKAR: Patrick Jucaud, the general manager of DISCOP, discusses the opportunities in the African market as the third edition of DISCOP Africa kicks off in Senegal.

As you read this, the third edition of DISCOP Africa will have opened its doors to a sold-out attendance of close to 400 production, distribution and funding executives involved in the rapid development of sub-Saharan Africa’s free- and pay-TV industries.

Fast-paced industries indeed, fueled by the joint effects of the rapid growth of digital television services, the proximity of the FIFA 2010 World Cup in South Africa, 300 million mobile users, and the first undersea fiber optic cable in East Africa, marking the beginning of an era of faster and cheaper broadband connections.

Unrivalled despite the explosion of the Internet and mobile communications, television dominates home entertainment in all the regions covered by DISCOP markets, including sub-Saharan Africa, where the recent expansion of television services has been on par with other emerging marketplaces.

With close to 35 million TV households and 3 million pay-TV subscribers, with four main languages—English, French, Portuguese and Swahili—sub-Saharan Africa offers unique opportunities for suppliers of finished programs, formats and packaged thematic channels ready to take the time to first explore the various degrees of development in of each of the 44 sub-Saharan countries that we target with DISCOP Africa twice a year (for the time being).

For over 20 years now, the DISCOP organization has been exploring emerging regional marketplaces with one common denominator despite the geographical differences: tangible, human connections are crucial drivers of business, and establishing these connections takes time.

This is precisely why we felt that holding one single annual three-day market was not enough to meet the continent’s appetite for televion content, especially in a context where 90 percent of the 150 sub-Saharan African public and private broadbasters, pay-TV platform operators and format adaptors who attended the first editions of DISCOP Africa—held last year in Dakar and Nairobi—had never taken part in any other international content market in the past.

Given all this, I would like to quote Charles Kenny, a development economist who spoke at this past NATPE, who in an impartial fashion establishes that the world will be in great need of fresh and popular programming. He predicts, that “in the not-too-distant future, it is quite possible that the world will be watching 24 billion hours of TV a day—an average of close to four hours for each person in the world with access to a TV set.”

The television content business has radically changed in the last decade, in ways that are still very difficult to sustain for many of our clients. This is why we believe that in such a context, our mission for the future is to continue to deliver opportunities in fast-developing regional marketplaces through the organization of compact, geographically focused, sales-centric and time-effective events formated to foster not only overseas but also intra-regional business.

Intra-regional business is key to the development of this industry in the various countries that we cover, and especially so in sub-Saharan Africa. I am proud to say that out of an average of 100 international content suppliers attending our DISCOP Africa markets, a fast-growing percentage of them are offering content ‘made in Africa.’