Challenges and opportunities faced by micro-entrepreneurs to legally screen movies in rural South Africa

Abstract

The entertainment industry world-wide provides lucrative business opportunities, and within South Africa, this market is still underdeveloped, especially within rural communities. Within this context, the FP7 MOSAIC 2B project aimed to empower micro-entrepreneurs by providing them with a Cinema-in-a-Backpack, which is a set of equipment allowing them to screen movies in rural areas within South Africa. However, to ensure compliance, these micro-entrepreneurs had to acquire the necessary licenses, which proved to be challenging given the regulatory environment as well as the different stakeholders involved. Using a systematic literature review as well as the MOSAIC 2B project as a case study, this paper reports on an investigation on the process and procedure necessary for a micro-entrepreneur to acquire licenses in order to screen multimedia content within rural South Africa. The paper provides an overview of the regulatory landscape as well as the nature of the film industry in South Africa. The main contribution of the investigation is a process model that could be used by a microbusiness to understand the requirements and process to follow when acquiring a legal licence for the screening of multi-media content within South Africa.