continued: "Media Explosion in the Arab World: The Pan-Arab Satellite Broadcasters" by TBS Senior Editor S. Abdallah Schleifer
page 4 of 4
page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Thus, three patterns are appearing. First is the Jordanian/Gulf pattern, in which relatively modest MMDS systems—operated as subscription television services by the government and carrying prestigious foreign programming such as CNN, BBC, AFRTS, MBC, CFI, and Prime Sports, which have minimal cultural-conflict impact—co-exist with DTH.(4)

The second pattern is being developed by Saudi Arabia, where dishes, as already noted, have been formally if not effectively banned and where an incredibly sophisticated and expensive MMDS system has been implemented by the private sector with government financing under the guidance of the Saudi Ministry of Information. In contrast to the small, essentially city-states of the Gulf Emirates and Kuwait, or the Jordanian MMDS, which is limited to the capital city of Greater Amman, the Saudi system will span the entire (and vast) territory of Saudi Arabia.

The third pattern is that of Egypt. There, a serious proposal to move Egypt’s joint-venture pay-TV operation, CNE, from encoded terrestrial UHF transmission to an MMDS system was provisionally endorsed a few years after CNE’s startup by the Minister of Information and the Minister of Telecommunications (who controls the microwave frequencies). But then CNE (or, more accurately, MultiChoice Egypt, the private-sector company that now administers CNE’s subscription management service and holds a small minority share in CNE) undertook a study of MMDS and, on the basis of that study, effectively recommended against its adaptation. (MultiChoice Egypt is the name of the highly successful Johannesburg-based MultiChoice Africa operation in Cairo.)

We will take a closer look at the Saudi and Egyptian models, as they have the most unambiguous bearing on the future of MMDS in the region. The initiative for MMDS in Saudi Arabia was undertaken by MBC’s sister companies Saravision and ARA. Saudi MMDS provides for the delivery of encrypted digital television programming from an uplink facility in England, via satellite, to approximately 40 MMDS reception sites in Saudi Arabia for controlled redistribution to approximately 40 cities and their immediate surroundings through microwave terrestrial transmission from the head-ends to subscriber homes, hotels and other sites (private sector offices, clubs, educational institutions, diplomatic missions and ministries).(5)

The television programming to be transmitted from the London area utilizes DigiCipher technology, a technology developed by General Instrument and used worldwide by many international program delivery services since 1992. It is an all-digital television communications system encompassing digital compression, digital transmission, and conditional access using digital encryption technology. This digital video/audio compression and access control design allows a little more than ten individual television programs with stereo audio to be transmitted within one satellite transponder. Saudi MMDS will have the capacity of offering 60 channels, but the system will most probably launch with 30 channels by the end of this year after testing in the fall.

ARA International’s business plan was originally based on the provision of three free channels—MBC 1 (the current general channel, now available either by DTH satellite transmission or in its rebroadcast form from Bahrain along the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia), and Saudi channel 1 and Saudi channel 2. The three channels will nevertheless be scrambled prior to microwave transmission along with the other specifically pay-TV channels, for the sake of transmission consistency. However, all receiver decoders will be instructed electronically to automatically decode these three channels (as well as a fourth promotional channel discussed below).

The remaining channels will be provided as subscription television. They will include four new MBC channels. In the original plan these were to be a film channel (MBC 2), a family/children’s channel (MBC 3), a sports channel (MBC 4) and general entertainment (MBC 5). Initially, the ARA business plan made no mention of directly competitive programming on the air. In addition to the new MBC channels, all of the remaining slots were provisionally allocated to various national television stations such as Kuwait TV and Oman TV. A high-ranking executive in ART indicated that at least four of ART’s own four specialized channels (sports, film, variety, children’s) would also be transmitted by Saudi MMDS.

What is significant here, from the programming point of view, is that MBC will be closing the tremendous gap between its own present mode of operation as a single general variety channel with a strong news component broadcasting in the open and that of its two competitors, the specialized, multi-channel encrypted television services offered by Orbit and ART.

Although the intention is to provide only programming that is acceptable to the Saudi Ministry of Information, a precautionary design has been developed to ensure complete control over the content of television signals received in the kingdom through the MMDS system. Editorial control is exercised through the access control system when the specifics of program content are known in advance. Where a specific undesirable program presentation is known of ahead of time, the access control system in Riyadh issues control signals to the addressable decoders, and the access control system will substitute that program with other viewing material available on a stand-by basis. When the undesirable program content is not known ahead of time, an editor has access to a real-time control mechanism which will interrupt the transmission and replace the segment of undesirable programming with a previously prepared teletext message.

This will be accomplished with a Manual Override Switch Server (MOSS), which permits an editorial control specialist or censor to monitor each channel and immediately interrupt the television signal by activating a switch that will block that channel throughout the kingdom. The interrupted program will be automatically replaced with a previously prepared teletext type message. (Every channel will have teletext capacity.) The editorial specialist will restore the original program when he is satisfied that unacceptable program content has ended, by again using the push-button switch control. Since a five-second delay has been inserted in each television channel at each MMDS head-end, the editor has up to five seconds to react to interrupt each program.

Despite several years in which announcements were made of imminent launches which never occurred, project implementation has finally taken place. The actual transmission system is now in place and the office facilities, warehousing, and dealer networks have been established. According to industry sources, ARA should begin tests this fall and by the end of the year will probably launch the service, with a first phase of some with some 20 channels.

The MMDS system will work for geographic as well as political reasons as the exclusive transmitting system for foreign television programming in Saudi Arabia and in Qatar, which has also banned dishes and started its own much more modest MMDS system and which, despite recent political rivalry, shares the Saudi official interpretation of Islam, an interpretation not officially shared anywhere else in the Arab and Islamic world. And it will work to a lesser extent for similar reasons in a state of coexistence with DTH in much of the rest of the Gulf and in Jordan.

The geographic factor is that, with the exception of a concentrated business district, the pattern of construction in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf is that of low-skyline horizontal expansion of residential quarters on flat desert terrain rather than the construction of high rise structures. Wealthy Saudis build larger compounds with bigger palaces; they do not build higher. Low-income housing is also invariably one- or two-story attached or semi-attached units, since the land and expanding infrastructure are available and since the conservative social mores favor this sort of dwelling, in which human interaction is familiar, over the high-rise elevator systems and long corridors that are impersonal in the grouping of people, in particular in the mixing of men and women. (Before anyone too easily ridicules this Saudi/Gulf perspective, it would be prudent to consider city planning studies undertaken in the United States which have developed the concept of "defensible space" and which reveal that high-rise low-income housing, with the elevator as its critical point, is always far more crime-prone, and in particular rape-prone, than low-rise smaller scale low-income housing.)

In Egypt, this geographic factor does not hold. Greater Cairo, which contains more than a third of Egypt’s 50 million or higher population, is jammed into the relatively narrow Nile Valley. The combination of rising property values and the shortage of desirable housing and luxury office space in the most fashionable quarters has resulted in significant construction of high-rise buildings throughout central Cairo, in particular in the fashionable Nile island quarter of Zamalek and the adjacent areas of Mohandiseen, Dokki and other parts of Giza. At the same time, high-rise structures are also going up on Cairo’s eastern bank of the Nile.

CNE’s strong minority private-sector shareholders (the majority of shares in CNE are held by the Egyptian Radio and Television Union, the public-sector body under the Ministry of Information which owns and operates Egypt TV) had been pressing the government for the license to install an MMDS system in order to better compete with their own multi-channel programming against available DTH satellite transmission, which has become increasingly popular in Cairo. The problem, aside from the expense of installing powerful transmitters on the part of an undercapitalized company such as CNE and the slow response to the competitive environment by its (until recently) public-sector-dominated management, is that only five UHF channels can be allotted to CNE; no more unused frequencies are available with the expansion in recent years of Egypt TV's UHF regional channels.

But when ORBICOM Transmission recently undertook a feasibility study for MMDS in Cairo on behalf of MultiChoice and CNE, the results were disappointing. More than any other form of transmission, the MMDS system relies on clear electronic line of sight from transmitter to receiver. That is not particularly available in Cairo.(6)

UHF in Cairo has 90 percent penetration. This means that 95 percent of the time UHF transmissions from the CNE tower on the Muqattam hills, which are the highest point in Greater Cairo and which flank nearly the entire city from the East, have 90 percent penetration. But an MMDS system with one transmitter on Muqattam could only reach 44 percent of CNE’s present subscribers in Cairo because of high-rise building obstruction and, in Heliopolis, because of the contouring of terrain. This important outlying district is where 40 percent of CNE’s present subscribers reside. The combination of sloping terrain and high-rise buildings indicates that only 16 percent of the population would have a clear path. In Zamalek, which is the smallest but most fashionable quarter of Cairo with an usually high concentration of foreign business people and diplomats—the most obvious market for CNE since a transient market of individuals is less attracted to the short-term expense of purchasing and installation of a dish—MMDS would have no penetration at all.

Nor are “beam benders,” or repeaters, seen as a solution in Cairo as Jordan TV’s MMDS management believes they will prove to be in Amman. Beam benders, according to MultiChoice—which operates successful MMDS systems in Nigeria and, on a selective point-to-point business communication basis, in South Africa—work only when you can isolate the receivers of the bent beam from other reception points to avoid cross reflection of signals, as can be done for the highly selective coverage in South Africa, and presumably also when beam bending down into isolated valleys from a series of hills, as in the case of Amman’s topography. Even if CNE undertook the expense of installing a second transmitter close to Heliopolis, they would be spending half a million dollars to raise Heliopolis penetration from 26 percent to 32 percent and still not affect in any way the loss of Zamalek.

So increasingly, the thinking in both MultiChoice/CNE and official circles in Cairo turned to DTH, and two program providers—ART for Arabic programming and Showtime for English-language programming—were lined up and initially offered together by Multichoice/CNE DTH on the PanAmSat 4 satellite, and now on the much more powerful signal generated by Egypt’s own Nilesat. [Editor’s note: see Nilesat 101 Channels for a list of channels available on Nilesat.]

Egypt’s own communication philosophy differs significantly from that of Saudi Arabia; when this philosophy is combined with the technical limitations on MMDS in the Cairo area, it further points Egypt away from MMDS and towards an embrace of DTH broadcasting. The Egyptian communication philosophy is also influenced, implicitly if not explicitly, by a conservative Islamic ethic. There is no soft porn or even partial nudity or obscene language on Egyptian TV, but it is an Islamic ethic that is broadly or liberally interpreted to allow belly dancing, Broadway-style chorus girl routines, miniskirts and bathing suits, movies with nightclub scenes that involve alcoholic consumption, and films, both Western and Egyptian, in which only the final sequences of seduction scenes must be cut.

Basically, this philosophy, as articulated frequently by Egypt’s Minister of Information Safwat al-Sherif can be called the “cultural sovereignty theory.” This means that instead of attempting to bar or heavily restrict and censor foreign TV programming, Egypt should concentrate upon upgrading and expanding its own television product, be it news or entertainment, so that it can ensure its cultural sovereignty in a globally competitive situation. This philosophy is particularly attractive to Egypt since it alone among the Arab states has the depth of talent for such an undertaking—actors, singers, dancers, musicians, comedians, journalists, producers, directors and even Quran reciters—and, courtesy of its earlier domination of the once-powerful Arab film industry, a colloquial version of Arabic that is fairly universally understood throughout the Arab world. This inescapably profound development of an ever-larger Arab audience for DTH will significantly limit the once-bright future of MMDS.

Equally plausible is the thought that we will soon see a curious faceoff in the skies between these two Arab allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who will be competing with rival satellites high above, and with alternative delivery systems and communication philosophies in that treasured space we call home. The three pan-Arab satellite broadcasters fall into a curious alignment—MBC to commit its fortunes almost entirely to the Saudi MMDS system; Orbit in all likelihood excluded from both Saudi MMDS and Egypt’s Nilesat but its future decisively cast with DTH; and ART playing it down the middle, formally committed, with its platform ally Showtime, via Nilesat to DTH while maintaining a strong if not thoroughly comprehensive position on the Saudi MMDS system—while all three broadcasters continue to converge in their approach to programming and program content. TBS

Notes:

1) Amin, Hussein. “Pay TV: World Overview.” A paper delivered at the Fourth International Radio and Television Festival, Cairo, Egypt, July 1998.
2) Foote, Joe and Hussein Amin. “Global TV News in Developing Countries: CNN’s Expansion to Egypt.” Ecquid Novi, 14 (2), 1993.
3) Amin, Hussein. “The Development of SpaceNet and its Impact.” Media in the Midst of War, ed. Ray E. Weisenborn. Cairo: Adham Center Press, 1992.
4) Lubbadeh, Fares. MMDS, The Jordanian Experience, IBC Conference, Publication no. 397. September 1991.
5) ARA International, internal document, 1994.
6) ORBICOM/Multichoice, internal document, 1995.

This article is based in part on S. Abdallah Schleifer’s paper “Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Systems,” presented at the Broadcast Education Association conference on April 8, 1995 in Las Vegas, and on his paper “Arab Satellite Television: The Second Phase,” presented at a symposium on Transnational Broadcasting in the Arab World at New York University, April 9, 1996.