Profitability remains elusive for MENA’s media sector 

Turning a profit is the central question for broadcasters in 2026. Moderator Karim Sarkis cut straight to the chase in the headline panel at November’s BroadcastPro Summit: the economics no longer add up.

“Our consumer habits have changed, and our content types have changed. But making money is one of the hardest things to do,” Sarkis, Partner at Strategy&, declared, setting the stage for the hour-long annual CEO Forum. Under the broad theme of ‘Navigating disruption and driving growth’, four regional CEOs tackled the industry’s shifting sands: Elie Habib, CEO, OSN+; Maaz Sheikh, CEO, StarzPlay; Peter Mrkic, Managing Director, TOD – MENA; and Somair Rizvi, co-founder and CEO, myco.io.

The regional streaming video market in 2025 is worth $1.5bn, according to global technology research and advisory firm Omdia. Demand remains strong enough that the market is projected to grow more than fivefold to $8.4bn by 2029, on the back of expanding digital infrastructure, high mobile penetration and a young, highly engaged population.

Against that metric, however, there was definitive agreement on the difficulties around profitability. “Making money on SVOD is hard. AVOD is even harder. And we’re between hard and very hard, trying to do both,” Sheikh said.

Bridging the gap between AVOD and SVOD

He was responding to Sarkis’ opening question – is it harder to make money with AVOD or with SVOD?

StarzPlay, Sheikh said, has been experimenting with a combined model. That means free access for some sports, such as the Indian Premier League (fully AVOD). With the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the prelims aired free with the main card behind a subscription paywall. “That seems to open up the funnel at the top and allows for conversion,” he said, adding that the move bypasses advertising on search and social media.

Experiments are now also the norm at OSN+. The platform recently launched an ad-lite tier, which Habib said should not be classified as AVOD.

He was unconvinced that AVOD alone can fund premium TV and film in the region right now. “Pure AVOD economics, in their current form in the Middle East, remain challenging to sustain for premium content,” he said. “That will change eventually as consumer psychology evolves,” he added, but he felt that’s unlikely in the immediate future, certainly not in 2026. “I still think SVOD has room to grow. If we want to continue producing top-tier content, whether Arabic or international, we need to invest more in a multi-tier SVOD offering.”

He spoke openly about how experimenting with revenue models is the way forward – particularly as streamers compete with YouTube on both content and monetisation. “I like to experiment … I say, let’s test and validate it. If it makes sense, then I win. If it doesn’t make sense, then I learn,” he said.

A stack of eight ads might work during Ramadan, but viewers tend to drop off outside the season, forcing broadcasters to reacquire the same users. “AVOD can be an effective acquisition strategy, allowing platforms to introduce users to the service in a lower-friction way rather than relying solely on external digital advertising,” Habib said. “That’s a strategy we use, and it makes perfect sense.”

By contrast, myco’s Rizvi brought a battle-tested AVOD story to the panel. “We started as an AVOD player. That’s how we built scale and got the bulk of the users to the platform. Once we let them experience the product, we were able to convert them into paying loyal customers.”

Sharing the advertising-based sports broadcaster’s approach to profitability, he said AVOD was always seen as a growth strategy and the platform’s decentralised revenue-sharing model sets it apart from other players. “That’s our differentiation. On Facebook, YouTube or any other social platform where you advertise, the ad revenue is shared between the creator and the platform, although it’s the viewer who is the most important element in this entire economy. And they’re left out.”

For him, ads aren’t a side hustle; they’re the foundation. The upsell comes later, and the real sell is often not the content but the absence of ads. “I feel ad-free is a real value that users are chasing. That’s why people pay for Spotify Premium or YouTube Premium.”

Mrkic’s approach remains adaptive. TOD is also still experimenting, though the platform’s catalogue is dominated by sport. “The industry is moving toward a mix of AVOD and ad-subsidised models. We’re assessing these approaches carefully, with the intent of selecting the one that delivers the greatest value to our viewers while supporting sustainable growth.”

The panel converged on one point: AVOD is a powerful on-ramp, but it’s not yet the destination.

Sport: Poisoned chalice or necessary evil?

From a content perspective, sport remains a high-traffic vector. The region’s diversity makes scripted content a challenge for most operators, who depend on high-demand events to drive subscriptions and advertising. Sarkis anchored the segment with an old horse racing joke: “How do you become a millionaire in horse racing? You start as a billionaire. Is it the same thing for sports rights?”

Four CEOs, four strategies: staying away from sports altogether, strategic partnerships, paying full value for rights, and profitably monetising niche rights in select markets.

The approach at TOD is to use sport to pull people in, then broaden their diet, Mrkic said. “We use sports to acquire customers, but then we use entertainment content to retain them.”

The operator’s bouquet features more than 50 sports properties, which he said serve as a differentiator against competition from social media and search platforms.

“If viewers are looking for short clips, highlights or ad-led content, there are plenty of platforms offering that,” he noted. “But many customers still value and are willing to pay for a premium, ad-free experience that delivers live sport and entertainment without interruption and at the highest quality.”

But what does it take to be profitable? Is sport enough? Or does it need to be combined with entertainment?

“We make fun of sports, but who’s made money on entertainment?” asked Sheikh. “No one. The reality is it’s not sports versus entertainment. It’s about building scale.”

He offered an insight into the region’s dynamics. With so many languages and tastes, he argued, there may be no single show that can reach 400m people. “The audience is very fragmented here … So how do you build scale if there’s no single entertainment product that’s going to transcend the 400m people? You have to go to sports to build that scale.”

StarzPlay’s most profitable product, he said, was rugby – though that only brings in around 20,000 customers. “Are 20,000 customers going to pay my bills and help me build a billion-dollar company?”

The rise of fandom as a revenue lever

But that kind of segmented, hyper-engaged audience could prove valuable to media companies, a 2024 Deloitte survey revealed. More than half (58%) of all GenZers and 50% of millennials say following their favourite music artist is important to their identity, with the number averaging 40% across both groups for their favourite movie, franchise or series.

For Rizvi, fandom presents the key lever for profitability. Myco sees viewers not as passive consumers of content, but as active participants with economic and creative influence. “We call it the viewer economy,” he said. “Making the viewers a stakeholder in this ecosystem is very important to get their loyalty, to get that engagement.”

GenZ in particular expect this kind of participation because they have grown up watching creators monetise directly on social platforms. “We treat fans as stakeholders [and] they get a share of our ad revenues. They get to choose, even in terms of what content gets produced, and we want them to invest in content with us, the way we are building our ecosystem.” A strategy that has worked for myco: fantasy sport.

Habib came at fandom from a different angle: lifetime value and churn. OSN+ uses analytics metrics such as time spent to understand how viewers connect with its content. “Time spent is the measure of how you know that you’re going to have more success. Because we’re in a recurring business, we fight churn. Churn is the enemy.”

He explained that identifying what attracts fans of the platform enables his team to market new products to them over the year, not just during Ramadan. “You own one month, you can do pretty well across the remaining 11 months … that seems to be the better way for us.”

Broadening the content mix with AI-only channels

AI is now de rigueur for every business plan. “I think the best part about AI is that it’s making failure cheaper,” Rizvi said, describing how AI tools are being used across the content end of the business, speeding up edits, creating animation and even in the creation of promos. The next step is launching an AI-native new channel. “We’re about to launch a 24/7 news channel completely run by AI, no need of studios, camera equipment, anchors…”

AI is also supporting the discovery and content detection space, he said, as well as in advertising technology. “There’s real-time A-B testing happening, where I can serve a different ad to you based on your profile and I’ll get a different ad served to me while a live sport is happening.”

Other panellists also framed AI as a support tool. Mrkic and Sheikh both saw applications in dubbing and subtitling.

Habib addressed a common misconception about data-driven content decisions: “We don’t fund projects like HBO’s next A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms just because of the data that we have,” he said, pushing back against the idea that algorithms alone determine big-budget productions.

Nor is AI generating new income streams yet (although AI-native channels may change that). Rather, it is defending the fragile ones. When ARPU remains low and piracy is persistent, AI helps slow leakage. “If viewers get a good ad that’s relevant to them, they’re not going to complain much,” Habib said. AI can reduce churn from poorly targeted ads.

At the end, was there a consensus around the big revenue question?

With several business models, a common pathway forward remains elusive. The panel agreed on the diagnosis: costs are rising faster than certainty. But no single monetisation model emerged as dominant. The answer, then, is not something as simple as building one revenue stream, but tighter discipline across every area of the business.

The panel ended on the topic of consolidation in the Middle East broadcast sector. “Consolidation will happen. I think the next probably 24 to 36 months, you’ll see far fewer players in this market,” said Peter Mrkic of TOD. “There are 57 streaming services in the MENA region, but the top five account for more than 60% [of the market] … [Consolidation] has to be the future.” He said that while the big players would continue to survive, smaller players would be swallowed up unless they operate within a specific niche.

The cost of priacy to the media business

Piracy came up repeatedly as a commercial constraint during the panel. Sheikh called it the biggest structural drag on streaming’s economics. “We see a significant impact on our numbers,” he said, explaining how interrupting illegal streams during the India-Pakistan cricket final led to “thousands of sign-ups in the last 10 minutes of the match”.

Sarkis, however, wasn’t prepared to let piracy stand as the all-purpose explanation. “Piracy exists everywhere. Game of Thrones … was the most pirated thing ever, and that didn’t stop HBO from becoming profitable. [But] if tomorrow you solved your piracy problem, are you all profitable?”

The consensus answer: Fixing piracy helps, but it doesn’t magically repair the P&L.

Distinguishing between piracy in different geographies, Habib said that MENA broadcasters have a harder time than elsewhere. In the US, legal restrictions prevent search engines from driving traffic to pirate websites, but “we do not have a legal infrastructure to stop pirated sites from showing up on search engines”.

Mrkic called piracy a daily operational war. With its volume of sports properties, he said TOD is “constantly being pirated”, to the point where he believes the service is one of the most bootlegged sites in the region. Besides fighting back through anti-piracy coalitions, TOD is pushing for tougher regulatory frameworks, though these remain in the nascent stage in the region.

Internally, beIN has assembled a tactical response team to tackle the issue. “We have dedicated teams across the group focused solely on combating piracy,” he said. “Illegal streams are identified and taken down, and fans are directed to legitimate, high-quality viewing experiences.”

BeIN has introduced a new tiered offering aimed at countering pirate IPTV sellers. Priced at around $10 in the UAE, the mobile-only plan gives viewers access to premium sports and entertainment on TOD, with the flexibility to upgrade to a full big-screen experience. The strategy is intended to offer a legitimate, accessible alternative for customers who might otherwise turn to illicit services.

Rizvi, meanwhile, brought a different take to the conversation: regardless of search traffic, the most dangerous pirates aren’t always on the open web. “I think IPTV is the biggest threat that’s behind secured walls,” he said. For AED 200, consumers can now access 14,000 channels, including StarzPlay, TOD and Netflix. “I feel that is where the control needs to be.”