No. 5, Fall/Winter2000

Special Issue:
The Arab World

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

TBS: Do your responsibilities include Europe?

Tydeman: That's an interesting story. When I was doing some work once with MTV, they had a guy who would say "there's no such thing as a bad transponder." One of the projects they were looking at was how they could upload a large number of transponders; they had a surplus of these when the world changed from analog to digital. That mentality had at one stage permeated our group. There was a period of time when I don't think there was a satellite system in the world that didn't have an option or a lease from our organization. That's changed, but the good news is that we fell across transponders and an opportunity to take our bouquet, since we own the content on the Arabic side, into Europe. We've become a niche-market programmer in Europe. And capitalizing on Hotbird, we were then faced with the dilemma of how to get into North Africa as well. North Africa is an interesting market, because like the Levant, it's French-Arabic. English is a distant third, we've found.

TBS: You're also describing the Arab market in Europe, many of whom live in France and are Magrebis.

Tydeman: That's right. And it means the content has to be different. You had a debate in a previous issue about pan-Arabism, is there such a thing. In North Africa everyone wants to watch the satellite that has French and Arabic on it, which is Hotbird, not Nilesat and not Arabsat. We've built our North African bouquet on Eutelsat. We've aligned with French programmers and now have a very nice French and Arabic bouquet; there are now nine or ten channels, but we'll have twice that many driving straight into the North African market.

TBS: Will that also play in Europe?

Tydeman: The French can't, because of rights issues. But it doesn't matter; and if we do it right it can be an advantage because you can tell subscribers that they'll get, for free, the following French channels.

TBS: So what's the situation in Europe now?

Tydeman: People talk about the "pan-Arab" market; back in 1995 people used to ask the same question about the "European system." I was with News Corp then, and we put up Sky and ran English-language programming across Europe on the grounds that there were one percent English speakers in every country, and if you multiply that it means you have a big audience. And everyone talked about pan-Asian, making the same argument. But none of those things worked. And I don't see many similarities between Jeddah and Casablanca, not just geographically but in terms of culture and attitudes and needs. You can, with digital transmission and relatively inexpensive transponders, package services to meet market needs. We've tried that with the Asian market, saying this is a criss-cross, the English language content is in both bouquets, but we've now tailored another bouquet specifically for the Asian viewer. The reality is that very few people want both bouquets. We can expand that and do the same thing in North Africa, the same thing in the Levant, the same thing in the Gulf. You're tailoring your services to meet the market needs.

TBS: A couple of years ago the only thing that was making money was ART's American operation. What's happening there?

Tydeman: My mandate doesn't include America, but the strategy for America has been that you can in fact bring Indian, Filipino, Chinese channels, and not even touch the content, because there are a huge number of expatriates and immigrants living in America. And there's a distribution system, whether it's cable or satellite, to deliver to the households. I think the American strategy of taking select channels for which 100 percent of the rights are owned by ART, packaging them, and using cable distribution can just be expanded and continued. It's a nice niche-market business. It exists because you've already got the core channels, so you can marginalize the costs against the revenues. If you had to actually set up a channel to put into America it would be a very unprofitable business.

TBS: But the next generation growing up there barely knows Arabic.

Tydeman: That's what they said about Zee, when we took it to the UK. Everyone feared it was anachronistic—the audience left India twenty years ago, India has changed. But the channels themselves also keep evolving, and there is still a strong desire by all of us who live outside our home countries to keep a link back there. And yes, the kids don't speak Arabic, they don't speak Hindi, but that's not because the parents don't want them to. The idea of having the channel, of having some link, is seen as desirable. So in that sense you capitalize on the desire to maintain cultural values, which is entirely natural.

TBS: There have been some significant and very positive changes in personnel at ADD. How did you manage to do it?

Tydeman: When I arrived at ADD, the mandate I had was to try to shift the organization from what it had been doing into those areas I mentioned: bouquet creation, management, marketing and distribution. What became very clear is that we didn't have in-house a lot of skills that were needed in the specialist areas. For example, we didn't have people with years of experience in pay television on the distribution side. We went about building up a team of as good professionals as we could find who had the experience in the region, had the experience in the business. Parallel to that, there were a lot of people at very senior levels who didn't really have the drive to move forward, or have the experience. So we tried to find other locations within the group and other ways to use the skill base of some of these people. Some moved into other places within the Dallah group [the original, non-broadcasting corporate vehicle for ART's president and source of many ART and ADD personnel], which was just perfect. We've been able to shape a top management team that is totally focused on achieving the objectives we've stated.

TBS: What projects are you working on now?

Tydeman: We're working on refinements to a pay-TV platform, which the digital age allows you to indulge yourself in—actually, it's not as much an indulgence but a necessity if you're going to survive. We're working on interactive programming and content; it's a little premature because the Open TV platform hasn't quite been released yet, that's three or four months away. Once the box and software are released we'll be ready with an interactive dimension. We're working on expanding the ART website into quite a dynamic portal, which will come online in the next couple of months. We're expanding and strengthening all of our SMS [subscriber management system] call centers across the region so we'll have state-of-the-art telesales and call center capability.

The bete noire of this region is EPGs—like everybody, we're working on fixing the EPG. You can invest a lot of time and effort to get the EPG working at the moment, but through the new Open TV platform, there'll be the capability of providing a lot more. Like everyone, we're trying to increase the potential for the viewer in giving them electronic information. We're also trying to expand our print-based presence in the region; because there wasn't a platform-focus before, we had lost the way a little bit in making sure all the newspapers and magazines had our listings. Even when there is an EPG, there are a lot of people who might not be getting your service but pick up the paper and see that you're carrying the Arsenal vs. Manchester match of the day.

TBS: How will Open TV work?

Tydeman: It provides the base from which the interactive TV and Internet TV work, and provides a framework to expand the EPG. I'm of the opinion that you need to be totally ambivalent to technology; one on hand you need to be aware as an organization of where it's going, you need to have somebody who's at the cutting edge of it--and you have to be hitting that person over the head when they try to get you to buy it. Because you really don't want to be at the forefront; it's changing so fast. We want to be moving in maybe in the second or third wave. Just because they've launched, for example, an interactive shopping service in the UK, where there are six million households with DTH receivers, doesn't mean we want to jump in with that service in a market where we don't even have a uniformity of receivers across the region.

Our philosophy is to be at the forefront of technological developments, so we know what's happening, but not necessarily to be the first to launch in the region. There's no real advantage to being first, as we found with digital boxes, launching them and then having to replace the boxes over time, or launching a service and having to modify it, or launching and then finding that there's no viewer base for the service that you're offering. The important thing is not to design your service to lock the technology out, and that's what we've been trying to do on the technology management side, to make sure that as these new services become available, we can add them. TBS