Afrostream

» see afrostream.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Afrostream published the list of countries it served, and that list is the whole explanation of my distance from it. France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and twenty-four countries across Africa. It was built for the francophone African diaspora and for the continent itself, and Turkey sits nowhere on that map. The name reached me in 2026, off a dated index of streaming shutdowns.

Afrostream was founded in 2014 by Tonjé Bakang and Ludovic Bostral, and the subscription service opened on 1 September 2015. The pitch, which the press repeated almost word for word, was a Netflix for African and African-American cinema, with Caribbean film and series in the catalog beside them.

It went through Y Combinator in the summer 2015 batch, took the standard $120,000, and raised about four million dollars in total. Orange Digital Ventures came in through the French telecom's corporate fund, alongside TheFamily and Cross Culture Ventures. Two thousand people subscribed before launch and put roughly a hundred thousand dollars through the service in four weeks. That was enough evidence of appetite to make the rest of the plan look reasonable.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The expansion was fast. By November 2016 Afrostream was live in twenty-four African countries, and by the end it covered twenty-eight. It shipped apps for Android and iOS, did its own video delivery engineering, and open-sourced a media server for producing MPEG-DASH streams. For a two-year-old company serving a market the major platforms had decided to ignore, the coverage map was the real achievement.

Bakang was also right about the gap he had identified. Black francophone audiences had no catalog aimed at them, and the large services were years away from caring.

~ the arithmetic ~

Licensing was the problem, and Bakang has been specific about the numbers: forty thousand euros to run one independent series for one year. A catalog that still looks thin to a subscriber can be ruinous to a startup, and the distance between what rights holders wanted and what a few euros a month could cover never closed. Free illegal streams of the same films were one search away.

By the spring of 2017 the investors wanted profitability before they would put in more money. Between April and August, Bakang talked to more than ten potential buyers, moving between American cities to push a deal through before the summer ended, because the cash flow would not survive it.

None of the deals closed. Subscriptions stopped being sold on 13 September 2017, two years almost to the day after launch. Bakang announced the end publicly in the week that followed, and the service closed definitively at the end of the month across all twenty-eight countries. Bakang then wrote his own post-mortem, in public, naming the numbers that had beaten him. afrostream.tv does not resolve today.

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