Anthony Vanky: The Face Detector and Community Sentiments Around Surveillance

Ben Pearson: Audiences, Infrastructures, and Representation in African Video-on-Demand


Started in 2008, the creatively-titled AfricaFilms.tv was the first video-on-demand platform dedicated to African content and audiences. Funded by the European Union and designed by an Italian film distributor, the service continued a long history of Northern developmentalism characterized by lofty aims and little concern for or knowledge of Africans. In doing so, it set a blueprint for subsequent early African VOD services by focusing on ameliorating global representational inequality rather than serving African audiences. This self-imposed burden of representation led many high-profile African VOD services, including AfricaFilms.tv, to fail. In more recent years, however, services like Nigeria’s IROKO have succeeded by centering African audiences and designing for African infrastructures. I’ll discuss some of these disparate approaches to African VOD and what they suggest about diversity, equity, and access in a global post-network era of television.