In just a couple of years, evision has evolved from a traditional content aggregator into a trailblazing media powerhouse. By boldly entering new markets, challenging conventional business norms and forging strategic partnerships – even with rivals – the company has redefined the rules of the game. In an exclusive interview, CEO Olivier Bramly and CCO Zahra Zayat share the story of evision’s successful transformation with Vijaya Cherian.
To most people across the GCC, evision was traditionally perceived as the TV arm of the technology group e&, providing IPTV services. However, industry insiders sensed a change on the horizon when Olivier Bramly took the helm as CEO a few years ago, a shift that gained further momentum when Zahra Zayat joined as Chief Commercial Officer (CCO). Under this new leadership, evision has evolved from a traditional content aggregator and IPTV service provider in the UAE into a holistic media and tech company that has disrupted the content and technology space in the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan (MENAP). It has boldly redefined conventional business models and embraced innovative, collaborative approaches, extending its influence not just within the UAE, but to the rest of MENAP.
Strategic acquisitions and bold partnerships
The H1 2024 financials released by e& last month testify to the company’s success. In a press statement, the company reported revenues of $7.69bn and net profit of $1.49bn; it now serves 175m subscribers across 32 countries. Evision’s own reach has grown to six million users (StarzPlay and Starz On combined). Its landmark acquisition of a majority stake in home-grown streaming platform StarzPlay in 2022 via a consortium with ADQ, coupled with the recent launch of its own AVOD service Starz On, has significantly bolstered its reach, with management claiming double-digit growth every month.
The company’s success hasn’t been limited to inorganic acquisitions. Recently, evision has also struck content partnerships with Sony Pictures Entertainment, Prime Video, Amazon MGM Studios and iQIYI.com. It has also secured exclusive MENA rights to ICC cricket alongside Disney+ Hotstar, further cementing its status as a regional leader in content.
“We have grown substantially over the last three years,” says CEO Bramly, reflecting on the changes at evision since he joined. “Three years ago, evision was primarily focused on IPTV within the UAE. Today, we’ve expanded far beyond IPTV and the UAE; we’ve grown substantially in our SVOD segment, which is why we acquired a majority stake in StarzPlay two years ago along with ADQ. We’ve also broadened our operations across B2B, hospitality and advertising. Now, evision operates in 22 countries, with revenue and profit coming from each market. This organic growth is the result of the company’s development across the region in various segments.”
Becoming a media and tech powerhouse
Evision’s transformation into a media titan has been driven by more than just strategic partnerships and acquisitions. Together with StarzPlay, it has invested heavily in technology, developing end-to-end, white-label solutions deployed at other regional telco facilities, providing them with a comprehensive 360-degree streaming platform which evision also maintains. A core part of the strategy has been the development of OTT platforms in different markets, and related technologies.
“We understand that delivering a top-notch streaming experience requires not just great content but also robust, secure technology,” remarks Bramly. “That’s why we’ve invested heavily in our tech infrastructure, managing our entire tech stack in-house with StarzPlay to ensure high performance and adaptability. We have maximised the synergies between evision and StarzPlay, creating a tech powerhouse to power our own products and sell white-label solutions to B2B customers across different markets.”
As a result, Bramly confirms that evision has now “been approached by leading telcos in Europe and Africa interested in our tech and content solutions”.
CCO Zayat expands on this, clarifying how covering multiple verticals has transformed evision. “Where we used to be a content aggregator for IPTV, we’ve transformed and become more agnostic. We were able to bridge tradition with technology because we had access to data on consumption behaviour – what people like, what they don’t and so on. Instead of remaining a content aggregator, we moved into the role of content licensor and tech product creator, developing our own cutting-edge solutions and white-labelling those products to B2B partners across different markets.”
Innovating with AVOD and SVOD
A lesser-known fact is that the consortium between evision and ADQ recently increased its stake in StarzPlay to 58%, to drive innovation across both StarzPlay’s SVOD platform and evision’s Starz On free ad-supported streaming service (AVOD/FAST).
“By offering both ad-supported content and SVOD options under a single app to our viewers, we can maximise reach and monetisation,” explains Zayat. “Initially Starz On was intended to be a stand-alone vanilla AVOD service, but we later decided to consolidate it with StarzPlay into a single app. We felt it was the best way to funnel users from the free platform to the SVOD platform. We attract users to Starz On, which is the umbrella app, monetise it through ads and create opportunities for them to transition to paid StarzPlay subscriptions.
“The key asset here is the data – understanding customer viewing habits and connecting that data with advertisers and brands on our platform. Our aim is to connect user preferences because you can learn a lot about people from what they watch and what kind of ads they click on.” She adds that the app has exceeded performance expectations.
Unlike local players primarily targeting Arab audiences, and international players focusing on Hollywood and Western content, evision has aimed for a broad, ad-supported platform that serves MENA’s more diverse market. As a result, evision offers a wider range of content in multiple languages and genres, from Hollywood and Western to Arabic, Korean, French, Chinese, Egyptian, Turkish, Indian languages, Urdu and sports.
“Today we are the third most downloaded app across MENA, following TikTok and Netflix. We’re also third in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt. While there’s still a long way to go, we’re the fastest-growing platform, with a 33% growth rate compared to 10% for the next competitor. We’ve surpassed six million users and subscribers in total. We’re experiencing double-digit growth every month,” explains Zayat.
Bramly emphasises that with this scale of growth, evision is “the leading media player in the region … We’ve transformed from a pure IPTV service with eLife TV to a major media player in MENA, managing six to seven streaming platforms – StarzPlay, Starz On, Switch TV, Twist TV in Egypt, Mobily TV in Saudi Arabia and Shoq in Pakistan – from A to Z, making evision a rather unique media company in the region.”
Zayat reiterates: “We power the content, we power the technology, and we manage those streaming services end to end.”
Starz On business and hospitality
The hospitality entertainment sector is close to evision’s heart, as it enjoys around 80% market share in the four- to five-star hotel segment in the UAE. Leveraging this high penetration and the success of Starz On, it will be launching Starz On Business outside the UAE by the end of this year.
“It will be the first-of-its-kind platform and not available anywhere else,” claims Zayat. “It will be pure OTT, supporting hotels, restaurants, small- to medium-sized businesses, and powering them with live content and on-demand content, but also giving them other services that the hotels and venues can use, such as booking an appointment, booking a spa or reservations at a restaurant, checking out of the hotel, in addition to other services and so on. So this is an on-site app. Starz On Business will be launched in the region before the end of the year, and hopefully we will have a global reach at one point in time.”
Pioneering AI-driven hyper-personalisation
As a company that is disrupting hugely in the OTT space, evision with StarzPlay has been testing the power of AI to hyper-personalise its content for viewers in two areas. Bramly explains that AI solutions developed with StarzPlay will streamline a lot of the company’s tasks, including quality checks on social media, censorship, syncing audio and video, making recommendations, ensuring more tailored content adjustments for different geographies through subbing and dubbing in various dialects and, more importantly, curating content.
AI is also helping to optimise customer outreach, allowing Starz On and StarzPlay to deliver highly personalised messaging to boost engagement and optimise social media, adds Zayat. The company is even exploring the potential of AI-generated content, including AI-produced shows and movies, as part of its forward-looking strategy.
But the real success of AI has been in the hyper-personalisation of content. Zayat says, “AI helped Starz On discover that content preferences varied significantly across different markets, with shows like Big Boss and cricket performing well in the UAE but not resonating in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Iraq. By harnessing AI-driven hyper-personalisation, we can tailor our content offerings to better engage distinct audience segments, which has led to optimising the content budget. In the UAE, this approach helped boost engagement among Western and Arab expat viewers, with the South Asian segment also performing strongly.
“We carry thousands of hours of content, and sometimes that content gets buried even though it’s very good. AI helped resurface some of that content and refreshed the platform for the customer each time with a new look and feel. This helps the customer to continuously engage with the platform instead of seeing just the top 10 new additions on the home screen each time. It ensured a continuously refreshed and personalised experience for each user.”
She says this strategy led to a 30% increase in Western content consumption even during the cricket season, contributing to a 15% overall boost in platform engagement during testing. The plan is to roll it out across all the pages on Starz On and StarzPlay first, and to other products incrementally.
Taking a calculated approach towards sport and originals
One area where evision and StarzPlay have made a bold entry in the last two years is sports, but Bramly is clear that the sports investment decisions evision makes are focused on impactful sport rights that make commercial sense.
“Sports content is a critical area of growth for us. It has a very high demand across the MENA and brings a sense of immediacy and engagement that is quite unique. But we don’t want to do crazy things. We make conscious, strategic decisions and are adaptable where sport is concerned. We ensure that our investments deliver good ROI. Cricket, for instance, is a sports right that works very well for us in this market. We partnered with Disney+ Hotstar and this partnership proved to be a huge success, particularly for the ICC T20 World Cup, which attracted millions of viewers on StarzPlay and eLife TV.”
Evision’s strategic acquisitions include the renewal of rights for ICC men’s and women’s events in MENA for the next four years. StarzPlay has also expanded into sports such as rugby, the Tour de France, Serie A (Italian football) and the UFC, for which it holds exclusive MENA rights.
“Sport is a key element of our content proposition. It’s not just about attracting subscribers, but also about retaining them and ensuring their satisfaction,” says Bramly.
“We’ve surpassed six million users and subscribers in total. We’re experiencing double-digit growth every month” – Zahra Zayat, COO, evision
Evision, however, also took some bold decisions regarding sport. When the pricing was not right, it parted ways with providers and secured other sports rights directly instead. StarzPlay also decided to stop selling sports in monthly packages, adds Zayat. Instead, access to premium sports events is now offered exclusively through annual packages.
Evision also monetises sports through advertising and sponsorships. For example, the annual pack for cricket on StarzPlay includes not just sports content but also entertainment offerings like Hotstar and South Asian content, making it more appealing to a broader audience. However, pricing differs based on the sport and segment it targets.
Zayat highlights the importance of this approach: “We want those who come for sport to stay for the entertainment as well, and that is key to avoiding seasonality and retaining subscribers with annual packs.”
To maximise the value of its sports content, evision integrates it with both its AVOD and SVOD platforms, giving its viewers fair options. It has successfully experimented with making certain sports content, such as women’s cricket on AVOD, available on the FAST platform, which has driven high engagement.
“The key thing about FAST is that you need to run channels that matter. Single IPs especially generate a lot of engagement and high consumption,” says Zayat, adding that evision ran a FAST channel related to the Paris Olympic games.
Evision’s sports strategy is multifaceted, aiming to not only attract subscribers through sports but to retain them with compelling entertainment offerings. By carefully selecting sports rights and integrating them with broader content, it ensures its investments are both commercially viable and strategically sound.
With regard to original productions, StarzPlay has produced very successful shows like Kabus, Million Dollar Listing and Harley with Mohammed Ramadan over the past two years. The evision team is clear that it would like to create more content with strong Arabic roots that can also appeal to a global audience.
The future
Evision’s long-term vision is to become a comprehensive media, entertainment and tech enabler. “We want to be a one-stop shop for all entertainment and technology,” Bramly says. The question that now drives its strategic planning is: how can key verticals be expanded to build atop their video offerings and add more value?
Bramly reflects on the opportunities ahead. “We’re exploring various new verticals that can enhance our offerings in media and entertainment. For a long time, we’ve been sitting on a goldmine of data. Now we’re finally unlocking its potential.”
“We understand that delivering a top-notch streaming experience requires not just great content but also robust, secure technology” – Olivier Bramly, CEO, evision
Evision has made significant strides in segmenting its data, allowing it to gain deep insights into its customer base. “Our advanced data analysis capabilities can provide useful insights into customer preferences. This allows us to create targeted advertising campaigns while maintaining the highest standards of personal data protection and privacy,” says Zayat.
This advertising initiative is currently focused on Starz On, but evision’s advertising arm is agnostic, clarifies Zayat.
“It applies to all our products, but the intelligence and tools we’ve developed can also be white-labelled. As evision, we act as an agency and a sales house, representing various channels and selling their inventory to advertisers. We’re wearing multiple hats here, managing our own advertising while also monetising the data we’ve acquired in a safe, controlled environment.”
This multi-faceted approach has yielded significant success, but Bramly and his team are not stopping there. Looking ahead, they are keen to explore new verticals that can drive further growth. One particularly exciting opportunity is the potential to link evision’s content and metadata with e-commerce platforms. “We envision a scenario where a customer can actually execute a purchase while watching a programme,” Bramly reveals.
Evision’s transformational journey serves as an inspiration to the region. The company has proactively explored diverse business and technical models, tailored its strategies to the varying markets it serves, and seized every opportunity to adapt, disrupt and innovate.
