Molotov is starting its international expansion this year with a dozen countries on the roadmap. First, the service will be available in seven African countries, starting with the Ivory Coast where it is already present, Senegal in January, Cameroon in February, Burkina Faso in March, Tunisia in April, Guinea and the Democratic Republic. of the Congo.
“When it comes to functionality, the service is more or less the same but the content is different,” co-founder and CEO Jean-David Blanc told TechCrunch. Molotov is betting on local partnerships to launch its service in new countries.
In today’s case, Molotov is partnering with Digital Virgo, a mobile payment company available in 40 countries. Digital Virgo manages relationships with local content owners. Molotov is taking care of the operations and the technology stack.
There will be 15 channels at launch, such as Nina TV, Passions TV, Trace Urban, Trace Africa, Trace Urban Africa, Savannah TV, Gametoon, Africanews, Euronews, France24, Trace Sport Stars and DocuBox. Molotov will also grant access to its Mango ad-supported on-demand streaming service.
To support its international expansion plans, the startup had to rework its infrastructure to be more robust: it relies more on cloud hosting and works with more CDN companies. For example, the service should work better if you don’t have the same bandwidth as before.
