MBC taps into the world of Internet TV

Media giant mbc is utilizing new channels such as internet and mobile to deliver its content to Arab viewers, 9 Arabic series being aired on mbc1 during the Holy Month of Ramadan will be available online for viewers from all over the world.

Does this mean that the wind of change has finally blew on Middle East’s media?

The Arabic content on the internet is still weak, it’s growing but if you take random search queries, most likely you won’t be very pleased with results, people used to blame it on search engines for not understanding the Arabic language, but I guess Google and other search engines made a big progress in this field. So it’s a matter of the availability of the content rather than the ability to reach it.

MBC is, by far, the biggest media operator in the region, imagine the amount of Arabic content they can contribute to the internet, they can easily build a huge portal that attracts millions of visitors, and by that pioneering the new media, which is coming sooner or later, even if it’s far from being fetched, they have nothing to lose, it won’t effect their viewership on TV, and even if it did, people will still look for quality programs, which MBC shows on it’s satellite channels, so the audience is gonna be the same, whether on TV or on the internet.

In 2007, TV catered 48% of the total advertising spends in the Middle East, compared to 0.6% spent on online advertising, so for such a large-scale media operator, online advertising in the Middle East is the crumbs of the cake. We are talking about $4 billion spent on TV advertising in 2007, and I guess MBC’s share is pretty big.

The other issue here is the reach, in a report that was published by Madar research couple of years ago, the total number of internet users in the Arab world exceeded 26 millions, a new report by Maktoob Research talked earlier this year about 40 million internet users in the Arab world, I guess somebody said that this number includes Iran as well, but when you talk about 85 million Arab viewers tuned in to watch the final episode of the Turkish soap opera Noor on mbc4, that’s twice the number of the digital Arabic audience.

But I still believe it’s a golden opportunity for mbc to enrich, and master, the Arabic content on the internet, for instance, they can create a video archive for their own shows and series, they can also create a wikipedia-like portal that includes information about Arab actors, singers, artists… etc., in addition to shows, films and series, it can even be a user-generated portal, and that would be the ultimate.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 10:06 am and is filed under Arabia, Interesting, Media, Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.