A Cinema in Every Pocket
Filmporte’s bet on the world’s second-largest film industry
Hi there,
Welcome to the 43rd edition of Next Capital, where we help you find Africa’s most promising startups, before they get big.
In our last edition, we wrote about a startup solving Nigeria’s 2-million college dropout crisis. If you missed it, you could catch up here 👇🏾
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Startup: Filmporte
Location: Global
Ask: $250k
Nigeria’s film industry, Nollywood, is the second-largest in the world by output, producing roughly 2,500 films a year. In 2024, box office revenue hit ₦11.58 billion (~$7.2 million), a 60% jump over 2023. The audience is clearly there. The infrastructure, however, is not.
Nigeria has just 102 cinema locations and 333 screens for a population of 220 million. That’s one screen per 660,000 people. Over half of all box office revenue comes from Lagos alone. The entire northern region has about 12 cinemas. For most Nigerians, the cinema is not a realistic option.
The filmmakers who do get into cinemas face brutal economics. Physical cinemas take up to 60% of gross revenue at the point of sale. Add entertainment tax, VAT, and distributor fees, and a filmmaker can expect to keep about 25% of what their film earns. A movie made for ₦50 million that grosses ₦120 million can still leave its producer at a loss.
The alternative routes aren’t much better. In late 2024, Netflix stopped commissioning new Nigerian originals, shelving multiple projects after years of investment. Amazon Prime Video had already pulled back from African originals earlier that year. When streamers do acquire African films, they buy the IP rights cheaply, sometimes for as low as $10,000; they lock creators out of audience data, and geo-block the content at will.
YouTube is where most of the volume goes. Nigeria has roughly 31.6 million YouTube users versus about 170,000 Netflix subscribers. This gap explains why producers have flocked there. Producers shoot movies and upload them to YouTube, earning money from ads.
But YouTube’s ad-revenue model pays African creators cents on the dollar due to their region, there’s no intellectual property protection to speak of, and filmmakers have no way to own or contact their audience.
The result is a race to the bottom: low-budget films churned out weekly, shot in the same house with the same actors, just to generate enough volume to scrape by. Of the 2,000+ films Nigeria produces annually, only 20 to 30 make it to Netflix. The rest, over 1,800 films a year, have no clear path to an audience or a return.
Last week, Next Capital caught up with Olumayowa Ayodeji, a serial entrepreneur and former UK banking professional who ran a software development house before turning his attention to this problem.
In 2024, he bought a ticket for a virtual cinema screening and noticed everything that was broken: tickets sold on one platform, streaming on another, broken links, films that wouldn’t play on certain devices. His tech instincts kicked in, but when he started speaking to filmmakers, distributors, and streaming executives, he found the problems ran far deeper than UX.
So he teamed up with Ayobami, a lawyer with deep experience in entertainment deal advisory and fintech, and together they started building Filmporte...
Shopify for Movies
Filmporte is an end-to-end film commerce platform that lets independent filmmakers publish, sell tickets, stream, and get paid, all from one place.
Think of it as Shopify for movies: the filmmaker uploads a film, sets a ticket price, picks a release window, and gets a unique URL that functions as a dedicated virtual cinema for that title.
When a viewer clicks that link, they see a stream page with the trailer, buy a ticket at region-appropriate pricing, and watch the film during its release window.
The scarcity model mirrors physical cinema — films are available for a limited time, not forever, which drives urgency and protects ticket economics.
On the filmmaker’s side, the platform provides:
Real-time earnings visibility, with a built-in wallet and bank payouts
Audience analytics showing where viewers are watching from, which demographics are engaging, and how a film is performing over time
Full control over pricing, release dates, geo-availability, and discounts
Support for short films, features, and series
The insight engine is a big part of the value proposition. On Netflix, a filmmaker doesn’t have real-time data on who watched their film, where they watched from, or what they thought. On YouTube, they get comments but can’t build a direct relationship with their audience.
Get in front of 11,000 investors, founders, execs, and tech enthusiasts in Africa.
Money Talk
Filmporte charges a flat listing fee: $150 for a full-length film and $50 for a short film. Then it takes a 15% revenue share on ticket sales.
Compare that to the traditional cinema model, where distributors and exhibitors can take up to 75% of gross, or YouTube, where creators often don’t break even at all.
The infrastructure is fully functional in production: end-to-end onboarding, film upload, ticketing, streaming, and payouts all work today. The team ran a paid pilot with two short films that generated actual revenue, validating willingness to pay.
It placed third at the Africa Creators Market hackathon, went through the Antler residency program, and has secured a partnership with FilmJoint and two advisory directors to help unlock industry relationships.
Its content pipeline currently holds 94 films. Among them are roughly 50 British titles and 5 films from other African markets outside Nigeria, a deliberate move to avoid being boxed into a “Nigerian platform” narrative from day one.
In February, Filmporte held a private weekend screening of two films made by a Nigerian producer. It had viewers from seven countries. It has also partnered with a top Nollywood producer for a global virtual cinema release. There are also strong considerations from producers in Ghana, South Africa, and the UK to do title releases in Q2 2026.
The team is working with filmmakers who have significant distribution power of their own, including creators with followings ranging from 600,000 to nearly 10 million across platforms.
Their go-to-market strategy is to onboard filmmakers with strong built-in communities, who can market their own releases and prove the model. As those early evangelists succeed, smaller filmmakers follow.
The Big Picture
The timing here is hard to ignore. Netflix and Amazon Prime have pulled back from funding African originals. Physical cinema infrastructure is stagnant. YouTube’s economics don’t work for premium content. Meanwhile, Nollywood output keeps growing, box office revenue is at record highs, and piracy costs the industry up to 40% in lost revenue.
Filmmakers are actively looking for new distribution paths. Some have started reaching out to Filmporte unprompted.
The opportunity extends well beyond Nigeria. The global independent film market is massive and underserved by existing platforms. Any filmmaker in Durban, Cairo, Nairobi, or London who wants to run a virtual cinema for their work faces the same fragmented tooling problem Filmporte solves.
The risks are real, though. Distribution is a two-sided market: Filmporte needs enough quality content to attract viewers and enough viewers to attract filmmakers. Convincing traditional industry players to change their ways is an uphill battle. The team has had distributors flatly tell them the model won’t work.
There’s also the question of whether audiences accustomed to free YouTube content will pay for tickets at scale, though early virtual cinema experiments in Nigeria suggest they will when the content is premium.
If Filmporte cracks the supply side by onboarding creators with built-in audiences, the demand side could follow. Community-led distribution, where the filmmaker is the marketing engine, sidesteps the traditional chicken-and-egg problem entirely.
So, do you think Filmporte can become the default infrastructure for independent film distribution in Africa and beyond?
Hit reply and share your thoughts.
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