Mobilising content cash

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Jad Atallah, Senior vice president, Mobision.

Improving platforms and a hungry audience have created a market for mobile video services. Now the race is on for service operators to source the content required to feed this appetite. Digital Broadcast speaks to key stakeholders as they look to monetise mobile TV.

With ever increasing competition for eyeballs thanks in part to the swelling number of FTA channels in the region and the glut of video available on the internet – both legally and illegally – broadcasters are keen to find new ways to reach their audience.

For news services in particular mobile video creates the perfect opportunity for short, snappy and immediate delivery.

“We’re hoping within the next three months we’ll have an expanded range of offerings. SMS, MMS, catch-up and 3G services,” says Steven Hall, CEO, CNBC Arabia.

“Currently, the content providers get a very small piece of the revenue pie and clearly, an adjustment has to be made in this regard. I think we need an altogether new business model to generate increased traffic and access to content. This will require a partnership between the telcos, content owners and the regulators,” claims Hall.

The terms of this new partnership will determine the relative success for each party. Hall is under no illusions about which direction the balance of power needs to swing for mobile video services to succeed.

“The existing revenue model doesn’t encourage content owners and providers to create tailored services for mobile. It sounds like a tired phrase, but content is king. You can have the best delivery system in the world, but without rich content viewers won’t be interested,” says Hall who goes on to say that broadcasters and telcos need to find common ground to benefit from each other’s strengths.

“There are things that we do best, and there are things that they do best. Telecoms operators are not producers. In the instances where telcos have gone into production it has been with very mixed success,” points out Hall.

One advantage CNBC Arabia has is that it is already producing all its content in Arabic. With a shortage in this area across all new media formats, the opportunity for Arabic language TV broadcasters across many of these platforms is obvious.

“It does give us an advantage to be producing entirely in Arabic,” says Hall. “We have a loyal and growing audience for the TV channel and I believe that this will transfer to our new media enterprises as well. Our content provides depth and analysis entirely in Arabic and there is a real demand for that across the Middle East.”

Content acquisition is obviously not the problem for producers such as CNBC. Those from outside the production business have more trouble and depend on aggregators or in-house efforts.

Production and distribution company A2 Avalon recently launched operations in the Middle East. With a library of 11,000 hours of material, A2 Avalon is in a position to offer vast swathes of programming to operators. There are often complications in the Middle East with the rights for stocks of content often split among several buyers across different platforms.

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