Why we attended AFRICAST - EMCOAN

Emeka Mba, DG NBC

The President of the Electronic Media Content Owners Association of Nigeria, Mrs. Debbie Odutayo, has expressed satisfaction at the role EMCOAN played during the conference of African Broadcasters – AFRICAST – held in Abuja last week.

The conference, which was organized by the Emeka Mba-led National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) focused on the key role that quality content would play in the digitisation of broadcasting in Nigeria.

According to Odutayo, everyone at the event agreed that content is king; hence, EMCOAN’s decision to play an active role.

She notes in a statement that the association’s Chairman Board Of Trustees, Mr. Wale Adenuga, and other members attended the conference.

She said, “EMCOAN has taken this initiative very seriously. Our members are the largest content providers in Nigeria. Part of the focus for AFRICAST’s this year was content and this cannot be achieved without the collaboration of EMCOAN.”

She added that a fallout of the collaboration is a plan by the Director General of the National Broadcasting Commission, Emeka Mba, to visit the association in November.

Formed in 2012, EMCOAN is positioned to protect the interest of content providers, especially in the Nigerian environment where, it believes, there are many contradictions.

It notes in the statement, “Television and radio stations demand pre-payment from content owners, knowing well that agencies which give them ads to run within their programmes never pre-pay.

Another challenge we face with the media houses is the non-transmission of programmes without prior information given to the content owner. This causes untold loss of revenue as the adds originally scheduled to run on affected editions cannot be billed to the agency or client.”

EMCAON thus urged practitioners to see content providers as partners and neither as inferiors or objects of exploitation.