Where does one draw the line between friendship and business? This should be one of Kwame’s pondering around now since his failed romance with Toyin Subair’s HiTV.
In case, you don’t know yet, beginning from next month, September, the Nigezie bouquet of music programming will no longer run on the HiTV cable platform.
HiTV was a breathe of fresh air when it came. And when it began showing the European Premiership League (EPL) games, its subscriber base soared. Right now, the story is changing. Not only has it lost rights to show the EPL, now music producers, Nigezie have pulled out and with lots of lamentations.
Insiders say that the relationship between the two bosses: Toyin Subair of HiTV and Femi Aderibigbe aka Kwame of Nigezie, has broken down irreparably.
The former friends, we hear, had been operating more on the strength of friendship than the business of media content provision. And ‘in the past three years Kwame has not received a dime from Toyin Subair for all his programmes’, a reliable source who wanted anonymity disclosed.
Already news has it that HiTV has commissioned a London-based audio visual production company Big Boyz Entertainment, to conceptualise and create contents covering music, lifestyle, fashion, entertainment news, comedy and more.
The favoured outfit to check mate Nigezie’s withdrawal or rebellion from next quarter, is led by singer JJC of the ‘We are Africans’ music fame.
Now that the party is over, and the court may be beckoning on two once close friends, should one take a look at the value of goods exchanged.
Nigezie supplied intellectual property for about three years and HiTV provided a cable platform for expressing them (the creativity) to millions of people via its subscriber base. In the process, Nigezie reached more people than it does on local television considering the duration for which its programmes held and how far reaching the cable television spread.
And while Nigezie achieved that on HiTV’s platform, the contributions helped liven and fill up air time on HiTV’s bouquets while giving more people reasons to not just own a HiTV decoder but keep subscribing.
Now that sources allege that there was never monetary exchange during both party’s alliance and that Nigezie is determined to get back its backlog of arrears using all legal means available, an award-winning soap opera may be emerging.