Now that Kenya has 4G internet in some parts, a lot of possibilities have been opened, the market is now ripe for video streaming services.
Video Moja is a new entrant in that streaming space with a promise of enabling Kenyans to access thousands of movie titles for free.
Interface and functionality
After singing up with your Google Plus or Facebook credentials, you will be presented with a simple interface. The home tab has four sections namely, latest, trending, recommended, and favorite. The sections and the user interface are self-explanatory and one gets their way around pretty fast. The recommendations section is random at first but it gets better as the app learns from your preferences. The favorite section hosts the movies that you liked by tapping the love icon.
Clicking on a movie at any section brings you to an information page. The page gives a brief description of the movie, the cast and a star rating. From the same page, you can share a movie with your friends via social media and you can also have a film moved to your watch list by clicking the “watch later” icon. Further down the page, there are a number of movies recommended; they are of a similar genre with the film in context.
Speaking of genres, there is a dedicated genres tab. The genres include Action, comedy, drama, romance, religious, and horror. In case you can’t find your movie, you can type its name in the search bar. The app conveniently starts displaying the search results as you are typing so you don’t have to finish the whole name.
There is a watch list tab that holds all the movies that you decided to “watch later”. If you change your mind on watching the movie, you can simply delete it from the watch-list with ease.
Lastly, you have a profile tab. This tab holds a compilation of all your watched movies in case you want to re-watch any of them. Under this tab, you can edit your profile and also make some setting preferences.
Impressions
While using Video Moja, there are some things I realized like the way every tab is reloaded a-fresh every time you revisit it, perhaps this helps maintain smooth performance by not overloading the RAM however, reloading the thumbnails every time might not be easy on your data bundles.
The movies in this app are sourced from Youtube, on one side, the move helps keep the content free, on the other side, the developers need to come up with new features to make people choose Video Moja over Youtube; all the current offerings on the app are already available on Youtube such as “liking a video” and “choosing watching a video later”.
Speaking of watching a movie later, the “share movie” button is so small and closely placed to the “watch later” button, such that it is hard to click one without accidentally touching the other
The selection of movies at the moment is mostly Nigerian. Well, given that the app has a Swahili name, I expected more East African content, hopefully some will come soon.
On a positive note, the list under the tabs kept changing with new content, this helps in discovering new movies. Moreover, for a video heavy app, Video Moja is fluid while navigating but to get the best experience, you will need a 4G connection and maybe 2GB RAM, and above, on your device. The star rating pop-up at the end of every movie is a great feature to collect ratings which are useful to other people who haven’t watched that particular film.
Pros
Free content
A large selection of movies
Quick app discovery from search bar and auto-refreshing sections
Fluid operation
Simple and straight forward interface
Cons
No Kenyan and International content, only Nollywood movies.
