No. 5, Fall/Winter2000

Special Issue:
The Arab World

continued: "The Dubai Digital Broadcasting Miracle" by S. Abdallah Schleifer
page 4 of 4
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The other Dubai digital triumph is E-Vision, the first real cable TV operation in the Arab world. What is usually described as cable is either microwave-relayed "wireless cable" as in Qatar, or, like Egypt's CNE and the Dubai Cable Network, an encrypted terrestrial UHF retransmission. Cabling homes in Dubai and Abu Dhabi (and eventually the rest of the UAE) with hybrid fiber and coaxial is viable, even if difficult, because E-Vision is owned by the UAE telecom, Etisalat. It is typical of the Emirati spirit that Etisalat recognized its opportunity and is taking it. It is also symbolic of Emirati recognition that Dubai is the media center as well as the most dynamic business center within the UAE, even while Abu Dhabi is the political capital: Etisalat is headquartered in Abu Dhabi, but its subsidiary E-Vision is headquartered in Dubai.

Only a few months after its launch, E-Vision now offers its viewers 60 channels of English, Arabic and various Indian language programming, with both ART cable and Showtime cable as its premium packages. Basic and premium packaging can still be increased as the digital cable system has plenty of channels to spare. But it is the interactive possibilities of cable, with its remote control having return path capabilities, that most excite E-Vision's management team headed by CEO Humaid A. Rashid Sahoo and Programming Operations Manager Ali Abdulla Saeed Alzaabi.

The E-Vision launch of a pay-per-view movie facility is imminent, and Alzaabi says it will be the first full pay-per-view in the region. E-Vision is also looking to take the lead in providing an EPG (electronic program guide) that does more than allow the viewer to navigate between the different channels and their different programs. E-Vision's EPG will be interactive; it will program viewers' preferences by program category or actor and inform the viewer when his favorite type of show or actor is coming up. It will be, according to Alzaabi, the first step in the region to personal TV. This advanced EPG is scheduled to be introduced before the end of the first quarter of 2001, to be followed by interactive games, interactive sports, and interactive advertising.

If both Dubai Business Channel and E-Vision are digital broadcasting examples that bear out El-Ghoul's analysis, his theme of Dubai building upon a solid reputation as a regional commercial center that fosters private enterprise, accommodates rather than harasses companies that need to employ skilled expats, simplifies startups, and is constantly improving infrastructure was echoed in dozens of conversations I had with both expat and Emirati executives during my two visits to Dubai this past year. A typical issue of the Paris-based Arabies Trends, a slick business and cultural monthly, devotes a page to new appointments in the Middle East. Three of the six news items in the June 2000 issue involve companies (Tag Heur, the Swiss sports watch manufacturer; United Technologies Corporation; and Fidelity Investments) moving to or opening their Middle East regional offices in Dubai. A report in the same issue on the struggle for the Gulf computer market quotes the regional directors of the leading international PC manufacturers in an article datelined Dubai, and takes note that the Taiwanese company Acer has just invested over $3 million dollars in setting up a modern complex in Dubai to assemble 600,000 PC units a year.

It is not a coincidence that the first purely Internet tabloid newspaper (or "webloid") in the region, newsofthegulf.com, has been launched in Dubai. Its publisher is Monal Zeidan, general manager of the new specialized PR company Matrix (and TBS's Gulf correspondent.)

Both the Dubai boom and the rise of Arab transnational satellite broadcasting go back to the same historic event: the 1990-91 Gulf crisis, or Gulf War II. Multinational and Arab regional business had migrated from war-torn Beirut in the late seventies and tried Cyprus or Greece, which were too far away physically and psychologically. A few tried Cairo, which then had seemingly impossible problems with infrastructure and an indifferent-to-belligerent bureaucracy. Most ended up settling for Bahrain with its offshore banking facilities and a modestly relaxed social life possible for expats. But Bahrain has "island fever"--a sense of no place else to go--and when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 it just seemed too close to the action. Dubai, by contrast, looked good: it's next door to Saudi Arabia but far from the danger zones, has equally good or better airport facilities and infrastructure, and has an excellent approximation to potential markets like Iran and India as well as Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.

But if you asked Sheikh Mohammed he would say it all began more than 40 years ago, when the dredging of Dubai Creek by his father, the ruler Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed al Maktoum, was the first step taken to convert Dubai into a regional business hub. There is still an extraordinary hustle and bustle about the Creek--traditional dhows outfitted with motors carrying re-exported product, typically Indian or Ceylon tea headed to Iran--that recalls Dubai's beginnings as an import and re-export center not only for Iran and India but for all of the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, which is served by road and by air.

It also has to do with esprit: with the unique way everybody accommodates each other; with the small Emirati elite whose male population tends, refreshingly, to prefer private enterprise to government service, and whose traditionally dressed young women are heavily enrolled in the Sheikh Zayed University and Higher Technological Colleges and who quite efficiently and politely handle the passport controls at the international airport; with the particularly large community of Indians visibly dominating small and medium sized retail trade; and with the Arab expats and the British expats, all of whom can aspire to the highest positions in (or own) private sector companies and now can own property outright.

It is a spirit of ease and accommodation that makes acquiring a visitor's visa to Dubai the easiest in the Gulf (with a few days notice one's hotel will arrange for the visa to be waiting at the airport). And it is most typified in contemporary terms by the prize-winning Emirates Airline operating out of Dubai International Airport's new Sheikh Rashid Terminal, which opened last April and incorporates within its seamlessly smooth operation (and universally polite staff) a duty-free shopping complex of 5,400 square meters--conceivably one of the largest, if not the largest, airport duty-free operation in the world. As an Oct. 24, 2000 report in the International Herald Tribune noted: "With passenger numbers expected to top 12 million in 2000, it seems as if the entire world is passing through Dubai airport, and all the world's goods can be found in Dubai Duty Free."

Just days after my last visit in Dubai I flew on from Cairo to New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, and struggled there to board a connecting flight to Washington DC carrying hand luggage and laptop up and down stairwells and wheeling them across potholed tarmacs, past generally incoherent and unhelpful JFK staff. And I thought: "Welcome to the Third World." TBS