Company Profile – Infoview is a website subscription service with an African curated subscriber base who can browse as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on any internet-connected screen. Members can read, play, pause and resume watching, all without commercials or commitments.
Streaming services are replacing linear services – People love movies and TV shows, but they don’t love the linear TV experience, where channels present programs only at particular times on non-portable screens with complicated remote controls. Now streaming entertainment – which is on-demand, personalized by Infoview, and available on any screen – is replacing linear TV. Changes of this magnitude are rare. Radio was the dominant home entertainment media for nearly 50 years until linear TV took over in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Linear video in the home was a huge advance over radio, and very large firms emerged to meet consumer desires over the last 60 years. The new era of streaming entertainment, which began in the mid-2000’s, is likely to be very big and enduring also, given the flexibility and ubiquity of the internet around the world. We hope to continue being African community focused in the streaming entertainment era.
Competition – We compete for a share of members’ time and spending for relaxation and stimulation, against linear networks, pay-per-view content, DVD watching, other internet networks, video gaming, web browsing, magazine reading, video piracy, and much more. Over the coming years, most of these forms of entertainment will improve. If you think of your own behavior any evening or weekend in the last month when you did not watch Infoview, you will understand how broad and vigorous our competition is. We strive to win more of our members’ “moments of truth”. Those decision points are, say, at 7:15 pm when a member wants to relax, enjoy a shared experience with friends and loved ones, or is bored. The member could choose Infoview, or a multitude of other options. Because the entertainment market is so broad, multiple firms can be successful. For example, ABC and NBC have historically competed for viewers, attention and content but have also successfully co-existed for many decades. Similarly, in the streaming entertainment world, HBO is now growing faster than in years past, while our business is also expanding. Many people will subscribe to both Netflix and Infoview since we have different content. The transition to streaming entertainment, with its greater consumer satisfaction, will mean growth for many services.
Margin Structure – Our operating margin structure is set mostly top down. For any given future period, we estimate revenue, and decide what we want to spend, and how much margin we want in that period. Competitive pressures in bidding for content would lead us to have slightly less content than we would otherwise, rather than overspending. The same is true for our marketing budget. The output variable is membership growth that those spending choices influence. We plan to steadily increase operating profit and margin as we balance growth with profitability. With our rapid increase in content spending, cash outlays are initially greater than content amortization, constraining free cash flow relative to profitability. We amortize content as quickly as justified, given industry norms and viewing history.
Video piracy is a substantial competitor for entertainment time in many markets. It is free and offers very broad selection. Were video piracy to become easy, reliable, and socially acceptable, it could become our largest competitor. Niche inexpensive services like Infoview will hopefully help insulate video from piracy.
