With a little help from friends Middle East TV expands

Michael Hedges March 15, 2008

The surest way to upgrade a languishing media market is to entice experience from afar. Sometimes money helps but in the Middle East, benefiting from record oil prices, that’s no object. A special expertise is most wanted.

News Corporation Europe, headed by James Murdoch, reached an agreement with Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal for a joint venture television project that will add two English language satellite TV channels to the regions media landscape. Prince Al-Waleed and Mr. Murdoch, The Younger, finalized the deal in January during Mr. Murdoch’s four day official visit to Saudi Arabia. The Prince hosted a dinner for Mr. Murdoch at ‘the desert camp.’

News of the deal began leaking after Prince Al-Waleed’s March 12th meeting with Saudi Minister of Culture and Information Dr. Iyad Madani. Details, at the moment, are less than sketchy. The two Fox branded satellite channels will take to the air by the end of the year. Fox Movies will, voila!, be a movie channel. The other will offer mainly American serials. Both will be uplinked from the Cairo facilities of Rotana Audiovisual, of which Prince Al-Waleed is chairman. Rotana is also charged with ad sales.

Variety reported the negotiations had been on-going for two years, News Corp owning the channels, splitting profits with Rotana.

Rotana Audiovisual operates 6 television channels, a radio network and a major pan-Arab music label. It publishes a branded magazine and operates Rotana Café’s… sort of like Hard Rock Café without booze. Prince Al-Waleed merged Rotana and Lebanese broadcaster LBCSAT, which Prince Al-Walled was the major shareholder, in August 2007. Occasionally, all of this show-biz attracts the ire of the conservative religious authorities in Saudi Arabia. The Prince rocks on.

Prince Al-Waleed announced a year ago the need to upgrade BSKSA Saudi State television. The four free-to-air channels were, as he put it, “locked between the 1950’s and the 1990’s.” 

The Prince also said at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, noted by Daily Variety, is was “important” to help News Corp, “the most important global media company,” gain entrée to the Middle East media market. And why not? The Prince is News Corp’s biggest shareholder (5.7%) outside of the Murdoch family. He’s also the biggest single shareholder in Citibank.

It was ten years ago that Mr. Murdoch, The Elder, tried to create a really huge TV company in Europe, bailing out Kirch Media with a $2 billion package that included Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset and Prince Al-Waleed. It failed. But we move on.

News Corp’s deal with Prince Al-Waleed and Rotana Audiovisual is its first serious television project in the Middle East. In 2006, the company took a 9% stake in Israel’s terrestrial Channel 10. But at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January, 2007 Mr. Murdoch, The Elder, said, “The investment in Channel 10 is marginal. It is for friendship, not business."

That friend is Israeli billionaire and Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan.

News Corp has media investments close to the region. The company entered Turkey in 2005 acquiring a major stake in outdoor ad company Kamera Reklam followed by buying television channel TGRT, eventually rebranded as Fox Turkey. News Corp may or may not own some or all of Imedi TV in Georgia.

In mid-February Arab Ministers of Information, meeting in Cairo, Egypt, passed a charter on satellite television viewed by Western media observers as a giant leap backwards for free expression. Titled “Principles for Organizing Satellite Broadcast and Television Transmission and Reception in the Arab Region,” the vaguely worded document was unambiguous in its endorsement of State censorship across the region. Egypt and Saudi Arabia sponsored the meeting and the document. Qatar and Lebanon abstained. No Arab States voted against the charter.

News Corp has significant experience working in regions where media is rapidly developing. Mr. Murdoch, The Elder, built a house in China and “closely cooperates with Chinese censors,” wrote Bruce Dover, former News Corp China manager, in Rupert's Adventures in China: How Murdoch Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife. Chinese authorities, it’s been said, were impressed that Mr. Murdoch, The Elder, would forego Australian citizenship for American to further the business. Perhaps Mr. Murdoch, The Younger, will follow that example.

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