John is a young employee based in Lagos. Based on the distance of his destination, he most times opts to use one of several ride hailing services – Ocar, Uber, Bolt (formerly Taxify).
But traffic is a menace in Lagos and most times, journeys take longer to complete than initially scheduled. During this long, weary and sometimes boring rides, John mostly finds companionship with his phone.
In instances where his device running low, he would likely miss updates of what is currently going on, on the news as he is stuck in traffic – thus confining him to a long silent ride.
But what if there was a device installed in the car that could keep him busy and entertained, irrespective of the circumstances of the journey?
Enter MooveTV.
Launched in December 2019, MooveTV is a Nigerian advertising tech startup providing entertainment in ride-sharing vehicles.
The platform provides viewers with an array of contents including movies, music, podcasts, games and live TVs for free. And like every other freemium streaming service, MooveTV displays ads for partners in between streams thus providing revenue for drivers, content owners, MooveTV and in some cases, referrals.
“With MooveTV, the driver earns 20% of the revenue on every ad played to riders in their vehicle,” MooveTV Product Lead, Emmanuel Pastor told TechNext. “The owner of the content also gets 30% while MooveTV takes the rest. In other cases, where there is a broker, they take 5% too,” he said.
Taxi tvs are not exactly new as they have been around for a while now. But passengers have always not fancied them as many of them force contents down the throat of users. Users also complain that they generate unnecessary noise and most times, have a limited pool of contents.
But this MooveTV is trying to scale. Unlike other in ride entertainment startups that pre-load contents into their devices, Moove streams all the contents from its servers. Thus passengers have a deep content pool to select from based on their preferences.
This makes it a multi-content free streaming platform, and like other freemium platforms, it displays ad contents in between video streams. MooveTV currently has a healthy array contents from its partners and its actively onboarding more daily.
The streaming comes at no extra cost to the drivers or passengers. Once interested, drivers contact MooveTV to get the devices installed for free. For now, the device is a Tecno Droipad but the platform has plans to introduce customised devices soon.
Once installed, the MooveTV device is synced to come up upon ignition by the driver. This way it ensures the device cannot be used for any other purpose. Devices installed in different vehicles are linked to a general data connection at MooveTV.
When there is poor reception, the device informs the passenger and offers the option to go offline and access the pre-loaded contents on the device. Once reception is stable again, passengers get the prompt and can go back online.
Although MooveTV currently has only its in-taxi platform running. It also plans to launch its mobile and web version before March, so that passengers can continue to stream contents even when they drop off the ride.
Currently, the platform has onboarded 70 drivers to its platform since launch and plans to increase the tally to 200 by February. It is also in talks with various transport companies, to provide its services for their vehicles with inbuilt players. It is also looking to partner the Lagos State Government to serve the BRT buses.
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