Title: Digital Nollywood: Implications of digital distribution for the Nigerian video industry
Abstract: This thesis analyses the implications of digital distribution for the Nigerian video industry (Nollywood). Following a media industry studies research framework and drawing from interviews with more than 50 industry stakeholders, this project argues the advent of digital distribution has opened formal pathways to transnational capital and audiences hitherto unseen in Nollywood. Yet rather than a rational and linear transition away from the industry’s historical informal dynamics, the emergence of streaming services in Nollywood has been marked by complexity, contradiction, and ambivalence through what I suggest are ‘pluriformalising’ market mechanisms.