THE MOVE
On 6 November 2025, EbonyLife Media founder Mo Abudu launched EbonyLife ON Plus, a membership streaming and lifestyle platform available globally through the App Store and Google Play, following a soft launch in September 2025. Per Blex Media's reporting, membership is priced at roughly $10 a year in Nigeria and $30 a year internationally — an aggressively low, subscription-led price built for a diaspora and continental audience rather than a Western premium tier. The platform is not framed as another Nollywood catalogue app but as EbonyLife's attempt to own the pipe, not just fill someone else's.
The proposition is deliberately more than video. Deadline and BellaNaija describe five 'experience pillars' — Watch It, Learn It, Shop It, Win It and Live It — wrapping streaming around masterclasses, an e-commerce layer for African fashion and art, a rewards scheme (700-plus UK retail outlets), discounted HMO health plans for Nigerian members, and an AI-powered education tool, ELEV8, carrying more than 5,000 videos. The content spine mixes EbonyLife's own IP — Blood Sisters, Òlòtūré, A Sunday Affair, Death and the King's Horseman — with Nollywood Gold classics, select Sony Pictures titles, and new originals including Baby Farm, which charted on Netflix's global Top 10, and Dust to Dreams, directed by Idris Elba.
The strategic core of the move is ownership. Abudu's own framing is unambiguous: 'EbonyLife ON Plus puts African stories back in African hands.' Where a Netflix or Prime commission makes the African studio a supplier — paid a licence fee, then severed from the audience data, the recurring revenue and the IP upside — a direct-to-consumer platform lets EbonyLife capture the subscription, own the customer relationship, and keep the value of the catalogue on its own balance sheet. This is the axis the entire bet turns on.
The move does not stand alone. In December 2024, EbonyLife announced, with Kuramo Capital, the Afro Film Fund targeting up to $50 million to finance African feature films with theatrical and streaming potential — the only creative-sector project from Africa selected for the African Development Bank's Africa Investment Forum Market Days in Rabat. Read together, the platform and the fund describe a vertically integrated ambition: finance the films, own the IP, distribute directly, and monetise the audience — the full stack that foreign streamers have historically controlled.