No. 5, Fall/Winter2000

Special Issue:
The Arab World

continued: "Turning ART Around: An Interview with John Tydeman"
page 2 of 3 / page 1 / page 3

TBS: Wasn't there concern within ART over the content of the music channel, that it might be in conflict with regional morals and values?

Tydeman: That's right, the channel had been in and out of favor with the group because of content, and that's pure and simple a management issue. I understand the whole basis for reacting. There's nothing wrong with the group saying it doesn't want blasphemous programming on its network. But there are several ways to deal with it; one is that the channel tells you in advance when you need to replace videos, and MCM is happy to do that. The channel is now back on.

Then we've been working with the Asian group—and there's a tremendous affinity between Arabs and Indians in movies. We have a premium Hindi movie channel, B4U, which we've put into our basic Arabic package. We've done the subtitling, now it's a matter of working out a minor technical problem, and the Arab viewer will be able to watch with subtitles while the Indian viewer doesn't have to have the subtitles. The three new channels, as I mentioned earlier, are the B4U music channel; Fox News, which we have exclusively in the region; and Bloomberg TV. We'll also have a new, exciting action channel.

TBS: ART has always resisted having news. How did you do it?

Tydeman: Two things: one is the switch I mentioned earlier from being a channel producer to being a platform producer. And the Sheikh [Saleh Kamel] has made that distinction perfectly, both intellectually and operationally. The other thing is that the region has changed. Al-Jazeera has changed everybody's perceptions of what can be a channel. Sure, they get rapped over the knuckles every now and then, like any news channel does, but everybody wants to watch Al-Jazeera.

TBS: But the news channel you're carrying, Fox News, is in English.

Tydeman: Fox News is in English, part of the package of channels we've signed with Star TV out of Hong Kong, which we put into the Asian bouquet. Star built their major platform for the Indian market, which is of course the Hindi channels. And of course India is the perfect country for the mix of English and Hindi. So we've now put together six English and six Hindi channels and packaged them together in a bouquet called Pehla, which we're selling in the Gulf countries—where there are over 5 million expatriate Indians, and it's a market everyone's ignored. We've been very fortunate in the sense that the owners of B4U had been years and years ago buying up the non-Indian rights to movie product, so they have all the top movies. They very cleverly packaged the film channel B4U and paralleled it with a B4U music channel, but with the Indian music they added in the international hits.

So we have six Indian channels: B4U, which is the premium movie channel; Star Gold, which is the best of Indian classic movies; two music channels, B4U and Channel V; Star News; and Star Plus--which is currently showing the program "Kaun Banega Crorepati," or "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." So we've got a pretty powerful start to a bouquet. We had the press conference in Dubai and went on a local radio station for a three-minute interview, and we were there over an hour. The switchboard was lighting up; people have just gone nuts.

Timing is important, and sometimes you just happen to be there at the right time. About a year ago the Indian programmers realized that for rights issues and other reasons they had to eventually encrypt. And they did—meaning that the Star channels, some of which had been in the Middle East, got encrypted and taken out of the region. People who had a package of channels free-to-air were now deprived of it. The absolute driving force in Indian TV—movies, sport, and to some degree music—were now encrypted. Sure, there were a few entertainment channels, but it wasn't quite the same.

Then of course, the Asian bouquet wouldn't be complete without sport, and there's only one sport, and that's cricket. With B4U we've been able to acquire some rights to Pakistani games, the Indian tours, and to the World Cup knockout competition. We've set up a new channel, Pehla Plus, which will be our premium events channel, on which cricket will play the role that football does in European and Middle Eastern programming.

We've gone the more traditional pay-TV path, which no one has really done here, which is to have a basic reasonable price. Pehla came in with twelve channels, increased on October 1 to fourteen, going maybe to sixteen or seventeen by the end of the year, at $25, which is pretty respectable anywhere. Then we've got Pehla Plus as the events channel, which at the moment is cricket, as a buy-through channel people can purchase. So we've straight-away started with the basic and the buy-through, and we can add other buy-through's or build on the basic if we want to expand.

TBS: Is your operation personally involved in building distributorships?

Tydeman: On the distribution side, we've done two things. ART had spent a lot of time creating in-house organizations, like Saudi Digital Distribution, a little like Showtime and Orbit have done. So we've got those organizations. The philosophy that our team has brought is that we need to have strong control of distribution, but also need to have the support of the independent dealers and distributors. We've worked very hard to build up an independent dealer network to support the organization that we have. That's been a very interesting challenge; our own people originally thought that these are "the competition" as opposed to the people who are going to make our business successful. As soon as we got that cleared up, it's been working very well. We've got a nice distribution network, which is expanding in the UAE, and we've got independent dealers in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. That's been a very important part of the platform: reestablishing a strong distribution base.

TBS: You're now carrying English programming in the bouquets. Wasn't there a "gentleman's understanding" between ART and Showtime over who was doing English and who was doing Arabic?

Tydeman: Not exactly. There are some areas where we don't compete with Showtime, and areas where we try to collaborate and get some channels together. We have different markets. Showtime has nothing for the Asian market, for example, except Sony Entertainment Channel, which is one channel in an English-language bouquet and doesn't really drive a lot of Asian buyers. We've gone the "Arabic-plus" path, while Showtime has gone the "English-plus" path. They've been able to capitalize on the fact that there are so many free-to-air Arabic channels around their English-language bouquet. And eventually Arabic-plus and English-plus meet in the middle.

Next page: Digital "refinements to a pay-TV platform"