How did cheap video tapes make Nigeria a film superpower?

By skipping the cinema. In Nigeria, a decline in cinema culture in the late 1980s left some cinemas turned into churches and others closed. Producers turned to video: films were shot on cassettes and sold in markets, so that a story could reach homes without a cinema, a studio or film stock.

A famous example is Living in Bondage (1992). Kenneth Nnebue had an excess of imported video cassettes, and he used them to shoot his first film on a video camera. The film was shot with a VHS camcorder, and its direct-to-video release was innovative at the time. It is regarded as the first Nigerian home video to achieve blockbuster success, though several historians argue that the video film industry was already booming before it.

The audience did the rest. Nigerian films told relatable stories, which left foreign films gathering dust on video-store shelves even though they cost much less. As of 2004, at least four or five films were produced in Nigeria every day, and in 2009 UNESCO rated Nollywood as the second-biggest film industry in the world after Indian cinema in terms of output.

Output was not money, though. The industry was worth about US$250 million, since most of the films were cheaply made, and some of its roots are contested: even the word Nollywood has no clear, agreed-upon definition.