Strive Masiyiwa took to his Facebook to announce that Sasai is launching a payment service in a week’s time. In his FB post, he talked about Sasai Pay in the context of consumers buying audio/video/music content online to solve the problems of piracy.
In a post published yesterday, Econet Global’s Chairman announced that the platform will soon enable African content creators to create and share content on Sasai with 3 new features:
- Moments – This will enable content creators to make short video content of up to 5 minutes;
- Watch – Extended length video content (up to an hour according to Masiyiwa’s post);
- Podcast – described as ideal for audio content and storytelling.
Where will Sasai Pay fit in all of this?
In a follow-up post to his announcement of the new content creation features Mr Masiyiwa explained that Sasai Pay will be used to pay for the content created on the Sasai platform;
The Sasai Content Platform is meant to create a Market Place, where hopefully millions of people will come to see the content from Africa. They will be able to pay using Sasai Pay [when it is fully operational next week]. Then there is the cost of data to see content Online. This is why I’m developing WIFI Finder.
All this takes creative entrepreneurship and investment. It takes time and patience.
Sasai is working on a content creation platform and from Masiyiwa’s explanation this will be a content creation hub for Africa first;
What I really want is a platform where Africans can express themselves, and showcase their amazing creative talents: from modern and traditional African music and storytelling (go interview your grandmother!) for instance, to futuristic programming to create video games. Africa is a bit behind on this one!
There isn’t much in the way of detail regarding whether all content will be behind a paywall or if content creators will be able to actually determine which section of their content is free and which is paid.
Currently, in the Sasai app, the Sasai Pay section is now present but trying to use the feature prompts the user to be a bit more patient as the feature is labelled to be “coming soon”.
Sasai Watch
This section of the application has a bit of information we can glean on. For starters Sasai Watch will use algorithms to suggest content.
After opening the Watch tab, I was prompted to select 5 topics of interest. At the time of writing there isn’t much in the way of content which is not surprising as there aren’t many content creators right now.
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