MTV Arabia

World Screen Weekly, February 21, 2008

COUNTRIES: Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Yemen, Palestine and Syria

LAUNCH DATE: November 17, 2007

OWNERSHIP: MTV Arabia is operated through a long-term licensing partnership between MTV Networks International and TECOM Investments and its media unit, Arab Media Group.

DISTRIBUTION: MTV Arabia is available via satellite (Arabsat and Nilesat) across the Middle East, reaching 36 million TV households (a potential audience of 190 million viewers).

CEO, ARAB MEDIA GROUP: Abdullatif Al Sayegh

DESCRIPTION: MTV Arabia is the first Arabic free-to-air youth entertainment and lifestyle channel in the Middle East. The network is also the first media platform in the region to embrace hip-hop culture, highlighting emerging Arabic hip-hop talent for the first time.

PROGRAMMING STRATEGY: MTV Arabia is aiming to fill a void in the Middle East for youth-targeted media platforms. “In the Arab world, 60 percent of the population is under the age of 25,” says Abdullatif Al Sayegh, the CEO of Arab Media Group. “There is no proper platform or proper TV station that talks to them on a daily basis and provides a space where they can express their creativity and where they can come and have a say or where they can come and show their talent.”

The channel is also keen on tapping into the popularity of hip-hop culture across the Middle East, with Al Sayegh noting that “whenever you bring a hip-hop artist to the region, the number of people that go and attend in comparison to any other kind of music is huge�this is the type of music that people just love.”

Al Sayegh acknowledges that launching an MTV-branded service in the Middle East, known for its conservative views, could have been a challenge, but this did not turn out to be the case. “We are so glad [that] our friends at Viacom gave us the flexibility in making whatever changes we feel are appropriate and make it acceptable by this society.”

MTV Arabia strives to make sure that content on the channel is relevant to Middle Eastern audiences by screening video clips “to ensure they are respectful of cultural sensitivities.” Aware that families are also watching, the network pushes “certain music or provocative programs that are a bit edgy” to after midnight.

Around 40 percent of the programming on MTV Arabia is locally produced, with the rest from MTV’s international library. Musical fare will air mostly during the day, while prime time highlights the best of MTV’s library, as well as local programming. Library content broadcast on MTV Arabia includes reality series like Rob and Big, Punk’d and Pimp My Ride.

MTV Arabia’s lineup of local productions is led by the flagship music-themed show Hip HopNa, which translates to “Our Hip Hop.” The series follows auditions to uncover the best local hip-hop acts in seven different Middle Eastern cities. The channel features other locally-produced music shows like Waslati, where viewers become VJs and introduce their favorite videos; Baqbeeq, a music trivia show about the most popular videos in the world; and Introducing Block, a behind-the-scenes view into the music industry.

The channel also features Arabic versions of MTV programs that are popular internationally, such as Al Helm, based on the Made format, which follows the journey of aspiring teenagers looking to fulfill their dreams with the help of an MTV Arabia-supplied ‘coach’; Al Hara 7, based on MTV’s international format Barrio 19, which tours the Middle East’s street scene and features people displaying innovative skills like skateboarding, dune bashing and water football; and Akher Takka, based on Boiling Point, in which actors antagonize stressed-out “victims” who can win a cash prize if they manage to keep their cool in extremely annoying situations.

MTV Arabia is also complemented by an Arabic- and English-language website that provides users with a comprehensive online community and a wide range of interactive elements.

Now that MTV Arabia has been introduced into the region, Al Sayegh hopes that there will eventually be even more localized feeds of MTV throughout the Middle East, such as MTV Egypt, MTV Saudi Arabia and MTV UAE. “We still want to wait for the research and see how the market reacts to the product, but we are definitely confident about the plans. We are doing a lot of unusual marketing activities which will create a lot of hype. We are giving the youth a lot of chances and we are introducing a lot of services that are not available in terms of this part of TV in the Arab world.”

Al Sayegh is also looking to bring more projects from the U.S. to MTV Arabia.

WEBSITE: www.MTVa.com

—By Irene Lew