Bella Naija is waging war on this our internet. Shebi you people said video is the future? Okay now. BN is not arguing. They’ve embraced it with the same kind of ruthless discipline that has inspired a million other online entrepreneurs. (Never mind that one of them, Linda Ikeji, has gone on to “chance” BN and now exerts an almost dictatorial level of dominance over Nigerian cyberspace.)

With the way they have gone to town with this, their “BN TV” tag might be well on its way to being a full-fledged brand on its own. In the past week alone, they’ve posted a total of 55 (fifty-five) stories centred on video content. And who can blame them? It’s 2016, the battle for eyes is fiercer than ever. With so many devices and screens available to audiences, the claws need to come out to maintain or even grow market share.

And in the same vein, the fact it’s 2016 also means that there might be shortcuts to fighting this fight. BN TV, for example, features entirely aggregated video content from different corners of the web. It’s almost like BellaNaija thought, “why waste money producing our own content, when there are so many other people flooding the web with free content already?”

In a time of Ndani, Accelerate, Red TV, any other bank-sponsored online TV platform we’re forgetting, and countless other webseries, films and vlogs making their way onto the internet, Bella Naija already has a plethora of options at its disposal, for keeping its audience engaged and building its video platform.

Of course, we have to wonder if they, like Pulse TV, will make a play for original video content soon.

Media Blogger