Does saying goodbye to user uploads put zoopy in direct competition with Africamars?

I got an email in January from zoopy.com about the new change on the site. In the email, their CEO Jason Elk talked about a change in Zoopy’s strategy to focus more on Zoopy TV. The African online video streaming site will discontinue user uploads and focus more on the more popular Zoopy TV section of the site which delivers TV content like shows and other programs.

Well, Zoopy started a few years back and grew popular in Africa, I think mostly in Southern Africa. In startups, pivoting a product or service to focus on an area with more traction or revenue potential is very vital for long time success. The same happened with my own African video startup AfricaMars TV. We from the beginning did not want to host user videos, because we thought Google was doing that for everyone in the World with Youtube. What we wanted to do was provide live video streams from African TV stations online.

Our Initial idea had lots of setbacks both infrastructure wise and biz dev wise. Then, after all the setbacks, we were forced to re-think how we were going about the whole project, then it hit us.. Boom!!! "Users don't want live streams (with a few exceptions like sports programming) on the Net, they want convenience. TV Anytime, anywhere."

When you look at all the Live TV streaming and User generated video sites that popped up between 2007 and 2008 and see how many of them have grown or gained usage anything close to what Netflix and Hulu have, you'll find out that there are none.. Once upon a time, there was Jhoost, Zattoo. Where are they now? Overshadowed by Hulu and Netflix like how Youtube overshadowed anything else including Dailymotion and Vimeo.

With all these at the back of our mind, we decided to carve a niche which we were already targeting but to do it differently, cost effectively and more convenient for the users.

We decided to go for TV shows, drama, news clips and movie clip streams on-demand. A model similar to that of Hulu but for African TV content. We believe this model is the way to go in-order to really solve a problem in the African entertainment market and not to jump into a very competitive market for user generated content or even a service whose market rarely exists.

So by going this way, the big question is, are we really in direct competition with Zoopy another African online TV service?

I think only time would tell but some regional factors may carve each service's niche for it. By the way, Zoopy is gradually broadening to a Global entertainment site while AfricaMars will focus more on African entertainment.