His name is Gabriel, and he sublets streaming services for a living.
I intended my first Adaptor Sector entry to be about agent networks, but yet another exchange on Twitter brought an Adaptor to me that I just HAD to talk about immediately. Someone I follow was looking for someone willing to add him to their Netflix account, in exchange for him adding them to his Amazon Prime. He said he couldn’t afford to pay for 2 streaming services.
And he is not alone. Talking to friends, family, colleagues, and social media followers, has let me know that most young white collar Nigerians – the most obvious target market for streaming here – cannot afford more than one service comfortably. In fact, such sharing or swapping arrangements as my follower was looking for, have become commonplace among friends and relatives.
But what happens, I wondered, to the guy whose immediate circle does not have anyone with the stream he wants, and who wants the stream he has?
He needs a wider market.
And so I tweeted:
Someone is going to build, or already has built, a matching service for this.
And, without me looking in a mirror while saying his name 5 times, he appeared:
I went to the handle’s profile and was so intrigued, that I gave him a call.
Gabriel saw a problem: Lots of people want streaming services, but simply cannot afford even one.
Others can afford it, but have difficulties with payment methods
Gabriel realized that a streaming service that permits a single subscriber to access it with multiple screens, can actually be seen as selling in bulk something that can be sold in sachets. And that’s exactly what he does. He buys lots of subscriptions, and resells the individual screens to his customers. So a single plan is now shared by a half dozen or fewer of Gabriel’s customers, who are each paying him less than they would have paid for the “bulk” service, but who, combined, are paying him more than he did for it.
He also allows them to pay with whatever method they’re comfortable with. This point is huge in Nigeria, where a lot of people would rather pay by account-to-account transfer (USSD) than by card.
Right now, Gabriel does it all “by hand”. He uses Excel spreadsheets to track his customers’ payments and IP addresses. But he told me he has a team putting together a platform to automate the process. It am interested to see what they come up with. But what intrigues me most is how the streaming companies will react to the existence of Gabriels, and how big the Gabriels would have to get before it happens. So far, we have usually seen the streamers turn a blind eye to people trading screens, but the jury is out on whether this is simply because they’ve priced in this type of customer behaviour, or because nobody has made enough sustainable profits on it to make them feel they are leaving money on the table.
Right now, Gabriel is a strictly a vendor. A retailer of
screens bought wholesale as subscriptions. So, he is only serving the market of
those who want and don’t have. Left unserved are those, like the tweeter to
whom I responded, who have, and want to share, swap, or sell. Would Gabriel’s
next step be opening up the supply side of his business, and making it a
peer-to-peer service? Is someone else already working on that?
The Adaptor Sector will be watching with keen interest.