No. 5, Fall/Winter2000

Special Issue:
The Arab World

There are also serious reports that a few Indian channels are talking about setting up in DMC. Something like 60 percent of the population of Dubai is Indian, and while that is probably the highest percentage in the Arabian peninsula, there are also large communities from the Subcontinent throughout the Emirates, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia.

Some industry experts have doubts about the viability of DMC. They point out the scarcity of talent for a broadcasting industry that has at least as much to do with entertainment as it does with journalism and public affairs broadcasting. But Saaed Hussain Al Muntafiq, CEO of Dubai Media City, pointed out in a talk earlier this year at the UAE Higher Colleges of Technology Conference that Dubai is located midway between the talent pools of India and Egypt, and that this talent can be accessed at a fraction of the cost it would take in developed economies.

A similar point was made by Jack Pierce, managing director of Jack Pierce Associates and a man with more than 19 years of PR, journalism and marketing experience in the UAE. He notes that advertising agencies and production houses throughout the Middle East, including those in Dubai, all used to look to London with its pool of talent and technologies for post-production or even production for TV and print. But the business and social environment here in Dubai was so positive, according to Pierce, that groups like Saatchi and Saatchi and other major advertising agencies started to put resources into Dubai, and increasingly agency film and video productions have been created there. Saudi agencies realized it was cheaper to go to Dubai than to London. And more customers coming to Dubai has in turn has drawn more facilities and skilled expatriate personnel.

But Sheikh Mohammed is not content to leave the issue of talent simply to market forces or even to the intensive educational concentrations at Emirati universities that he has in mind. Dubai Media City’s management has announced an Annual Media Students Awards program to encourage young media talent from universities in India, Lebanon, Egypt, and South Africa as well as the Emirates. According to the DMC release, media students from these countries will be encouraged to compete for awards in the fields of photography, journalism, radio, TV production, filmmaking, graphic design, and advertising. The awards will take the form of either scholarships for postgraduate studies or the payment of fees for intensive training programs at internationally recognized institutes. Lubna Alattia from DMC’s commercial team will be taking what she describes as “a road show” to campuses in the five targeted countries to talk to students about the event, in what seems to be shaping up as one of the most intensive commitments ever made to stimulate university programs in mass media communication arts in the critical talent pools of that Afro-Arab-Asian land mass that Dubai Media City sees itself serving as a major, if not the major, broadcasting hub.

Many of Dubai Media City's future occupants are already in Dubai, drawn there by that same accommodating environment. In the late eighties, according to Pierce, there were only two PR firms in Dubai. Now "all the big players are here, some 25 firms, not to mention a number of one-man operations run out of a spare bedroom." Pierce noted that Dubai has become such a regional PR hub that agency specialization is already underway; one local agency with an expat owner has focused on IT, and the newest agency in town, Matrix, is specializing in IT and digital media, representing both Showtime and the new cable TV operator E-Vision.

Not only do all of the leading advertising agencies have their regional head offices in Dubai, but so do a number of international wire services. Reuters recently migrated here following a two-decade odyssey that took them from Beirut to Cyprus to Bahrain. All of the pay-TV transnational broadcasters have some sort of regional sales and/or production office here, including Orbit, Star, Showtime, and ART. The Disney Channel, which is part of the Orbit bouquet, has its regional headquarters here, and presumably it has no problem finding local talent and facilities to handle its complete Arabization; the channel dubs all of its animation and subtitles its live action product in Arabic. (Orbit carries the original English-language Disney channel as well.) The most successful Dubai operation is Showtime, which earlier this year opened its new offices in Jebel Ali, the first free zone in Dubai and geographically a threshold to the Dubai Internet City-Media City district.

Rawhi Abeidoh, who heads up the Reuters regional office in Dubai and who was the Reuters bureau chief in Cairo in the late nineties, remembers his first tour of duty in Dubai (1976-1989) when he headed the Emirates News Agency. Abeidoh says the visible changes in Dubai--the topography, the skyline, the new fashionable neighborhoods--are phenomenal and the pace is dizzying. Back in the late seventies, and even into the late eighties, to drive from Deira (the original concentration of new Dubai along the Creek, with its first fashionable hotels and office towers) to the Jebel Ali Free Zone "was to drive through desert."

Abeidoh is alluding to the "Fifth Avenue effect" along Sheikh Zayed Road, where an entire district radiating midtown to uptown high-rise Manhattan chic lines both sides of the highway: residential towers and office towers, malls, and the fashionable restaurants and nightclubs that fill the pages of the Emirates' own edition of "What's On" and keep the huge expat community occupied.

Still another equivalent building boom is underway close to the DIM-DMC complex, in Emirate Hills. What is envisioned here, and is already partially visible, is an incredibly well-landscaped suburban community of luxurious private homes with generous landscaped surroundings. Emirate Hills and perhaps other somewhat less breathtaking residential developments in the area are expected to house the 100,000-strong workforce that is expected to eventually man the DIM-DMC complex.

One Dubai-based independent production company, Network Productions, has already been given the green light to build a new $16 million production studio complex in Dubai Media City. $2.6 million of that investment will be spent on equipment. According to Digital Studio magazine (Oct. 2000), Network Productions, working with its technical partner Omnix International, will incorporate its current facilities into a new three-studio television complex that will support five TV channels and work as a production and post-production overflow facility for broadcasters working out of Media City. The modular design of the facility, which should be finished and usable by spring or early summer 2001, will enable Network Productions to expand to accommodate additional clients.

Network Productions managing director and founder Raid Abdul Hadi told Digital Studio that each of the three studios will be a four-camera setup. "One of the new studios will include retractable stadium seating that will be used for game shows and interactive programming. Another studio will have a virtual set while a third will have a full news production system. And that is just the beginning. The facility will also have a new telecine suite, a dedicated duplication setup and major outside broadcast capabilities." The entire facility will cover 1,000 square meters of land and will include five stories of office space, makeup rooms, and a prop store. Channels managed by Network Productions will be video streamed for web broadcast. The proximity of Internet City, with a big Microsoft presence there, makes Dubai Media City an obvious leader in developing media streaming for the entire region.

It is also apparent from Sheikh Mohammad's remarks that he sees the giant multinational media corporation with global interests as a force that must be served if Dubai is to be the "ideal center" for media that he envisions. He made note that AOL/Time Warner encompasses all aspects of media and by inference typifies the convergence of boadcasting, entertainment production and the Internet that the proximity of Dubai's Media City and Internet City will address. continued

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