With widening broadband access and high mobile penetration rates, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is seen as the next great growth opportunity for OTT platforms. And STARZ Play is looking to tap into the advantages of having been in the space early. Launched in 2015 with the backing of Starz and Parsifal Entertainment Group, STARZ Play is available in almost 20 markets across the MENA region. In addition to premium scripted series from Starz, the SVOD platform has locked up the rights to a huge array of U.S. network television titles as well as plenty of Hollywood movies. Sitting alongside those are locally sourced shows from the region. The CEO and co-founder of STARZ Play is Maaz Sheikh, who is using his experience in both digital media and pay TV\u2014he previously worked at regional platform OSN\u2014to deliver a compelling subscription offering to viewers.<\/p>\n
TV MEA:<\/strong> What were the biggest obstacles in getting the service up and running? TV MEA:<\/strong> Given the credit-card penetration issues, how important have your telco alliances been? TV MEA:<\/strong> What do you see as some of your other key advantages? TV MEA:<\/strong> Are you buying content from the region as well? TV MEA:<\/strong> What role does kids\u2019 content play on the service? TV MEA:<\/strong> What kinds of things did you take into consideration when designing your user interface (UI)? And how are you helping users find the content that will interest them? TV MEA:<\/strong> How are you using viewing data to shape your programming decisions? TV MEA:<\/strong> What expansion opportunities are you eyeing in the near term? The CEO and co-founder of STARZ Play is using his experience in both digital media and pay TV\u2014he previously worked at regional platform OSN\u2014to deliver a compelling subscription offering to viewers. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":1741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[321,253],"class_list":["post-1740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-interviews","tag-maaz-sheikh","tag-starz-play"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nSHEIKH:<\/strong> One of our biggest learnings was that this is the type of consumer service where you have to be perfect or near perfect in all aspects, from the user interface to content to billing and payment options to digital marketing. They\u2019re either moving from a linear environment that works or from YouTube or Netflix to your environment, so there\u2019s no room for errors. Being a start-up, we were fortunate enough to have Starz\u2019s backing, financial and strategic. That helped us quite a bit in terms of getting the product and the service right. We developed the platform and the service from scratch, optimized for this region. So Arabic interface, Arabic subtitles, but also for Northern Africa a French interface and French content.<\/p>\n
\nSHEIKH:<\/strong> That is one of our strongest advantages. We are partnered with 13 telecom operators. Netflix is not partnered with a single one yet. That makes a big difference. As you said, the credit-card penetration is fairly low, especially when you move out of the Gulf countries. On top of that, the consumer behavior is very mobile-centric. The majority of our sign-ups, 80 percent, happen on mobile. And people will explore the service through a mobile browser.<\/p>\n
\nSHEIKH:<\/strong> We discussed methods of payment, that\u2019s extremely important. We think we have a significant advantage there. The next element is that of platform ubiquity. This is where Netflix, being a major global player, has a strong advantage\u2014they\u2019re available across all platforms, from Apple TV and Samsung Smart TVs to PlayStation and Chromecast. We\u2019re trying to catch up to that platform ubiquity. We think that\u2019s an important element of the service. On devices, we are catching up to Netflix. Where we have an advantage is we\u2019re also available on operators\u2019 IPTV set-top boxes. So a customer connected to an Etisalat broadband home has a set-top box at home and on that they can access the STARZ Play service. Same for Saudi Telecom, same for Ooredoo TV in Qatar and so on. And the third advantage is how we\u2019re localizing the content, both from Hollywood as well as from an Arabic point of view. Netflix\u2019s strategy for original content is great for a big part of the world, but perhaps those series are not as relevant in this part of the world. Where they\u2019re focused on making the next The Crown<\/em> or House of Cards<\/em>, for us shows like Grey\u2019s Anatomy<\/em> or The Flash <\/em>or Lucifer<\/em>, your mainstream Hollywood series, combined with the premium titles that we\u2019re bringing to the region from Starz, like Black Sails<\/em> and Power<\/em>, are doing extremely well. This combination is working for us.<\/p>\n
\nSHEIKH:<\/strong> We are catering to a pan-Arab audience. We have Gulf Arabic content that\u2019s produced in Saudi Arabia and UAE, in Kuwait. About one-third [of the regional programming] is Gulf-centric. And then there\u2019s another one-third that is Egyptian but has a combination of Egyptian and pan-Arab casts. The third bucket is content produced in the Levant region, so Lebanese and Syrian casts, produced mostly in Lebanon. We haven\u2019t gone into movies yet, but we are licensing TV shows, dramas and comedies, from these three Arabic markets.<\/p>\n
\nSHEIKH:<\/strong> It\u2019s evolving. We\u2019re only two years old, so part of it is we\u2019re still learning. Our audience tends to be 18- to 35-year-olds, so we do well on older teen shows like The Flash<\/em>, DC\u2019s Legends of Tomorrow<\/em>. Anything younger than that, we haven\u2019t seen very strong traction there, even though we have some very strong kids\u2019 content.<\/p>\n
\nSHEIKH:<\/strong> You can go back 20 years and the pay-TV operators would say, there are hundreds of channels but how do we connect the content with the consumer? And I think in the OTT world it\u2019s no different. A lot of times consumers are not looking past the first few carousels they see. We do a couple of things. The first is that we\u2019ve experimented a lot. We record, in the cloud, customer sessions and their interactions with our apps and our browser. As they move their mouse around or they browse through carousels, we track their behavior, trying to understand: are they going past the first screen, are they clicking on the button to scroll right, do they even see the button? Based on the heat maps of those sessions, we change our UI. We\u2019re constantly fine-tuning our user interface. We also do a lot of A\/B testing. Once we decide we\u2019re going to make a certain change, we will make it and direct some of the traffic there and see how it performs. If it\u2019s doing well, then we\u2019ll roll it out more. That\u2019s user interface optimization. Those two things helped us a lot in terms of getting the user interface right. In terms of content curation and presenting the content, we\u2019ve learned and observed what leaders like Netflix and Amazon are doing. I won\u2019t say our recommendation systems are as advanced and sophisticated as Netflix\u2019s, but we\u2019re getting there. We\u2019re fine-tuning our recommendation engine, and we have a personalization service. You can create different profiles within your account, and within each profile the service is personalized to you as an individual.<\/p>\n
\nSHEIKH:<\/strong> It\u2019s extremely important. Coming from a linear, pay-television background, I think the content acquisition business is no longer an art form. Once you start from a certain hypothesis and you start with a certain number of hours, after that the next 2,000 or 3,000 hours you buy is mostly based on your analytics and data insights. You have to be holistic about your analytics and the message you are getting from that data. We see extreme value in that and we let that guide our acquisitions. There were certain aspects of our initial content acquisitions that we didn\u2019t get right. As we saw content consumption and the patterns, we realized where we needed to focus more, and we did that. For example, initially when we launched we didn\u2019t have as many mainstream network shows on our service, but, in addition to Starz, over time we\u2019ve added U.S. network series from Twentieth Century Fox, CBS, Disney, Paramount, Showtime, Sony and Warner Bros. and our consumption has increased quite a bit. We let data drive everything. But it\u2019s not just about consumption either. One of the things we do is try to differentiate between what drives customer acquisitions, what drives consumption and then what reduces churn. These are three different things. For example, we will put out creative for Vikings<\/em>, The<\/em> Flash<\/em> and Black Sails<\/em> and we\u2019ll experiment with different creative in different markets. Black Sails<\/em> might do well in UAE, while The Flash <\/em>does well in Saudi and Vikings<\/em> does extremely well in North Africa. We experiment with creative to track the impressions and the click-through rates and to track from click-through to subscription. Which assets are working in terms of new customer acquisition? Same for churn. If people are consuming certain series, certain box sets, are they less likely to churn? We\u2019ll then go after more of that kind of content.<\/p>\n
\nSHEIKH:<\/strong> We think the Middle East and North Africa has been fairly untapped. There\u2019s a big underserved market between MBC as free-to-air and OSN as the premium pay-TV network. We don\u2019t necessarily see ourselves only as a digital VOD service provider. We see ourselves as affordable, premium television that happens to be digital. There a big market to serve. Opportunistically we\u2019re looking at countries beyond the Middle East. There are a few options that we\u2019re looking at; once the economics make sense, we\u2019ll be announcing those. For now, we\u2019re focused on the MENA region.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"