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Buying and airing foreign content |
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by Nour Malas and Khaled Ammar
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The Pay TV market continues to grow slowly, relative to the surge of new Free to Air channels, with three private companies – Orbit, ART, and Showtime – competing for viewers. Prices aside, the competition is over channels and content, and the foreign programming market offers a good lead. Providers vie for exclusivity deals with American production houses to offer their viewers programs not available anywhere else. Choosing, buying, and adapting foreign content to an Arab audience is a painstaking process, but it pays in securing viewers –and offers a good overview of market demand.
Khulud Abu-Homos
Senior Vice-President of Western Programming
Orbit satellite television and radio network
Launched in 1994, the Orbit network includes more than 45 Western TV and radio channels and 10 Arabic channels (of which 80% is produced in-house). Orbit maintains production facilities in Cairo, Riyadh, and Beirut.
Foreign markets
 Orbit buys the majority of its foreign content from the major Hollywood studios and, to a lesser extent, non-typical American productions from small, independent producers. In May of each year, we attend the annual LA Screenings to view and select fresh content from the latest Hollywood productions. As for shopping for independent productions, we meet twice a year in Cannes during the international film and TV markets of MIPTV and MIPCOM, where we view their productions, eventually selecting what we think is interesting and suitable for our viewers and our region.
Selection
There are various steps to buying programming. The first step is getting to know what is being produced on an annual basis. Our main criterion for selection is quality. If we’re talking about a movie, this means: cast, box office revenue, genre, story line, production budget, and quality. More important still is what viewers in the Middle East want. Determining viewer’s taste is challenging, since Orbit’s footprint covers around 23 countries.
Once we go through this process – which is a long process, because we sit for days and days watching and taking notes – we start discussing with our marketing department what we have seen, and what we think is suitable, based on continuous feedback we get from the market on what people want. Orbit performs quarterly market research with its subscriber and non-subscriber base to test the waters and determine tastes. We keep an indicator of how trends change in the Middle East by asking viewers various questions, and this helps us in selecting our movies and programs.
Screening rights and airtime are factors that determine the cost of purchasing and airing foreign content. Acquiring exclusivity rights means you will be the only platform to air the program, which certainly costs more. It also depends on how many times you will air a certain show within a year and what kind of broadcasting window you are buying. Are you buying a video-on-demand window, a pay-per-view window, or a free-to-air window? It is complex. It depends on what you are buying, how you are going to be offering it to the viewers (the means of transmission), how recent is the production release of the show, the size of its production budget, and quality level.
Feedback
We launched in 1994 and there was no pay TV. We were the first digital pay TV platform in the world – and the first to introduce the pay TV concept in the Middle East. Satellite had just started at the time. People’s knowledge and preference was totally different than today. Nowadays, everyone knows Friends, Seinfeld, ER, and Jay Leno, unlike ten years ago when Orbit first aired the programs. There is more knowledge of Hollywood productions. Over the past four years, Arab tastes have come to appreciate Western theatrical and TV productions. While our viewers appreciate regional productions, they also aspire for international cinema releases.
Censorship
One of the promises to our viewers is that we show all our programs uncensored. However, we are still a family-oriented network. That’s why we give all viewers – and parents in particular – the facility to control the kind of programming that their children are exposed to, through various program ratings and the Orbit Decoder which provides the Double Parental Control application.
So we don’t censor any of our programs; we leave it to the viewers to decide what they want to watch. But we certainly put a control on the content issue when we select which programs and movies to buy, with regards to suitability in terms of sensitivity, political, and religious content, etc.
The Arab viewer
Ninety percent of our output is subtitled in Arabic, with the setup box allowing viewers to turn that option on or off. Some viewers like to follow what is being said in Arabic, but others think that it diverts their attention.
Regarding the idea of adapting programming to an Arab viewer, Orbit’s strategy is based on either acquiring original Western programs or producing Arabic original productions. The globalization of the industry means we are now talking about one market. The Arabic viewer is well-traveled, and has a solid understanding of entertainment and theatrical production. I don’t think that viewers want us to “adapt” or modify any of the Western content that we show. They want to see what is being produced as is. We believe that the Arab viewer has a high-end taste for quality programming. There are sensitivities and different tastes in the Middle East than in the U.S. – but at the end of the day, everyone has the desire to watch exclusive and high-quality entertainment.
Mustafa Tell
General Manager
ART Movie World
ART currently has one movie channel (ART Movies) and several other foreign channels to complement its foreign content package. The bulk of its programming is in Arabic.
Selection
We get a listing of titles from different sources. The first step involves going through the list to make sure we don’t have the titles already, as we do get a substantial number of repeated titles offered to us. Once we eliminate the ones we already have, we conduct lengthy research on each film, using the Internet and our reference library in addition to our staff background in film and media. In our research, we check the background, storyline, and what kind of ratings the film obtained. Unfortunately, a lot of distributors only send us a couple of storylines that do not reflect the real story behind the film. In case we need additional information, we ask the producer or distributor to send a screener.
Once the final list is complete, we start the negotiating process with the source. We attend MIPCOM in Cannes and we try to attend showcases once every year. You usually find the same group of producers and distributors at all the events, but they would always have something new in terms of films. We try to get films outside of Hollywood and also international films from independent producers.
Censorship
We try to avoid horror films, especially the ones with gore scenes. We don’t want to see blood [and] things that may be offensive to our audience. We stay away from sexual content and political issues that are sensitive as related to the Middle East. We can either cut it or decide to take part of the material out. However, if the part to be taken out will affect the storyline, than we’d rather not air the movie. We don’t have the option whereby the audience can choose what to watch, since our library is limited and we are still a young channel. We are in the process of building up our library of foreign programs – unlike the Arabic channels, where we own the rights to a considerable number of Arabic films.
Feedback
The feedback from the audience is usually very positive. People feel it’s very safe to watch ART because it is a family-oriented platform with their Middle Eastern values. They are not going to be surprised with something offensive to them. We try to uphold some of the conservative values we have in the Middle East, and we say that we are a conservative channel. Basically, all the studies we made showed that Western entertainment is the most watched material after sports. A lot of people refuse to watch other channels and would like to watch foreign movies, but are worried about the content for their children and family. A lot of households will have both. They would have our channel to be watched during the day and the other channels to watch late at night.
In our package, we have Star Movies from Hong Kong [in] a special Middle Eastern version. Since we receive the whole signal from them, they clean up the films, if necessary, as we cannot interfere with the broadcast. They replace some movies if they are deemed sensitive to us. In the event of a complaint, we would contact them and tell them not to show that part in the future. But this case happened only once.
Markets
We get our content mainly from agents in Lebanon and Dubai. However, we are increasingly dealing with producers and distributors directly, since this provides us with more leverage. Although this would mean more hassle and work, results are better guaranteed. We don’t only air new releases and blockbusters, but also movies from the ‘70s and ‘80s because, in my opinion, there are lots of great films that need to be seen by the younger generation. We try to make sure that whoever we buy the films from have the rights for them. Each contract is different from the other, depending on the production year and exclusivity rights. We obtain releases either before or after Showtime and Orbit, and sometimes exclusively for ART. The most recent films in our grid date back to 2005 and 2006.
Marc-Antoine d'Halluin
President and CEO
Showtime Arabia
Showtime Arabia has a lineup of 40 channels. The content and schedule of 20 of those channels is determined in Dubai; the remaining 20 are derived from outside the Middle East.
Selection
We have strategic deals with five Hollywood studios: Paramount, Dreamworks, Disney, Universal, and Sony. These are multi-year deals by which we effectively have exclusive access to the movies and series produced by these studios. As part of our policy, we buy one-year exclusivity rights for foreign content because this is the value the subscriber finds with Showtime. The subscriber will know that anything they see will not be available [on free-to-air] before one full year and that our movies will not include any advertising breaks.
In addition to these five output deals, we purchase movies or series from independent suppliers and producers. 50% of our foreign content, excluding sports, comes from the five Hollywood studios, with the rest coming from independent producers or suppliers based in our Middle Eastern region. We also buy lots of rights for our sports channel. We go to Hollywood screening events as part of the selection process.
Censorship
 Obviously, we have censorship, since we buy content specifically for the region. And we are, in essence, putting together channels that are regulated by ourselves. We make sure to propose content that is inline with what the region is, from a cultural standpoint, accepting on TV. The majority of movies broadcast by Showtime are largely uncut, with only a small percentage being subjected to scene cutting. It would be completely counter-productive to air content not suitable for the region. This would not attract subscribers and would infuriate our current subscriber base. At times, we can decide not to broadcast or purchase a movie or program because we deem them unfit for our audience. We are not in the business of trying to show things that would provoke the audience in the region.
The set up boxes we have allow subscribers to control the content they want to watch. From a political standpoint, we make sure that the opinions shown in movies – when there are such opinions – are not in direct opposition to any current political debate in the region. We cannot control the content of the channels we receive from outside the region. However, we are very careful in selecting them so as to ensure that the type of content they would broadcast is in tune with the region specifics. For example, we recently decided to replace the European feed of the E-Entertainment channel with E-Asia because we deemed its content unsuitable for our Middle Eastern audience.
 Feedback
We strongly focus on subscriber feedback because a satisfied subscriber is a customer who will renew his or her subscription. We have regular monitoring of our subscriber base through monthly audience surveys. On average, and excluding the month of Ramadan, the audience share of the Showtime channels versus FTA [free-to-air] is about 50%, and a lot of it is generated by the movie channels. We appeal to consumers who are fed-up with watching movies being cut by commercial breaks, as is the case too often with FTA channels.
All the content we put on our own channels is subtitled into Arabic and we recently began dubbing the international series “Ugly Betty,” with initial viewer feedback being very positive. |
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