ROK Africa, a subsidiary of ROK Entertainment Group, the UK-based mobile technologies, applications and entertainment company, has signed an agreement with FoneWorx, a telecommunications service provider to distribute mobile technologies and services to mobile operators across Africa. Over the next six months, FoneWorx will roll out ROK mobile technologies and services to 30 mobile operators across Africa.
The process will begin with the distribution in East Africa of ROK TV, a mobile streaming service where the consumer can watch a range of live or on-demand content streamed to their mobile handset. This will be followed by the addition of Fonepark, a dynamic Internet and WAP site generator that allow a user to create their own mobile content sales site, in 13 other countries including Nigeria, Angola, Zambia, Namibia and Mozambique, where there are around 70 million mobile users. The service will also be made available to public broadcasters.
Under the terms of the agreement, ROK and FoneWorx will share the revenue earned from the distribution. The proposed pricing is Rand 10 (0.73) for a single download that includes both channels, with subsequent channels being charged at a rate of R3.50 per week. It is expected that the operators billing retention will equate to approximately half of these costs. The service will assume the name FoneWorx TV.
The deployment of ROKs mobile applications into Africa has been a key goal, and FoneWorx have a truly pan-African reach into dozens of mobile phone operators across the continent, says ROK CEO, Laurence Alexander. We are looking forward to subsequently rolling-out a number of other unique ROK applications in addition to Mobile TV.
FoneWork Operations Director Robert Russell says the company is delighted to have partnered with ROK. He says:
ROK technologies have proved to be best of breed in the streaming of high quality video over mass-market 2.5G networks, which results in a much more positive user experience than ever before.