Interview: MTN's Christian Bombrun on growing content services

MTN Group Digital Platforms CEO, Christian Bombrun, sat down with Connecting Africa at Nextv Series Africa 2023 to talk about the telco's growing focus on content creation and the value of its new MTN TV proposition for subscribers.

Bombrun spoke about the telco's role in the over-the-top (OTT) ecosystem and the huge opportunity it sees in the market.

"Our analysis is that in Africa the network is improving, the penetration of smartphones is going up a lot, but the consumption – if you look at the number of video views and the number of good quality services being consumed – is still far behind what's happening in the rest of the planet," he said.

He said the telco is investigating how it can bring good quality content in terms of gaming, streaming, music and other channels to the end user.

Bombrun also touched on how MTN is navigating regulation in the 19 markets it operates in across Africa and the Middle East.

Bombrun also announced two new initiatives, one being MTN Play which he believes will be the gateway for telco's digital content distribution services.

"The second one we call MTN TV, which is a video TV initiative which we are making live in all our markets," he added.