TechnesstivityWe Can’t Perfectly Livestream Anything Out Of Nigeria
The first time I ever tried to plug into a stream was in January 2012. Occupy Nigeria protests had begun in Abuja, and someone on Twitter was streaming via a LiveStream plugin in Battabox, so I tuned in. The stream was working fine for the first few minutes, I could hear Fela over the speakers at the protest and then the streamer tried to capture something in a tree. Paused. Forever.
Last week, the Koko Concert Wilderness Walk was held. When the stream finally started on NdaniTV, our YouKay friends were excited. They didn’t have to pay and suffer to watch the concert after all. About 30 minutes into the stream, something miraculous happened. There was no audio. How do you livestream a music concert without audio? N35 billion half-year profits won’t help you. The simple fact is that you cannot stream High Definition content out of Nigeria.
I missed Django Unchained to watch live stream of Koko Concert appaz Ndani tv is fucking up
— Lanre Folarin (@IamMafioso) December 27, 2012
“@osa_nwa: mehn,,very useless something RT @giwa_a: @osa_nwa my link no dey make noise lol” ndani.tv/blog/koko-conc…
— O. (@OreOdulana) December 27, 2012
Let’s take a step back. Before TedXVictoria Island, we were promised a livestream. I got to the event on time, started live-tweeting it and people who couldn’t attend kept asking me for links to a livestream. There was no livestream link. An uplink wasn’t provided until about an hour and a half into the event. About 5 speakers had been on stage.
TedXZumaRock also couldn’t stream live up to the promises. I kept refreshing the website waiting for a video link until I was told by one of the speakers that the videos would be uploaded much later. Speaking about uploading videos, it took me 3 weeks to upload an 84MB FLV file for our Tecno N3 review.
BattaBox – what you’ll call a streaming pioneer in the Nigerian techspace, doesn’t even support streaming anymore. You can only upload to their YouTube plugin. Note that YouTube also has a livestreaming service.
If you’re out there and you’re looking to start an on-demand livestreaming service, you probably should just do it. You should also be very very patient. If Koko concert, as close to all the submarine cables as it was, couldn’t be streamed perfectly, we have a very long way to go.
Image source: Troll.me
