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Genre Wars and the Reality of Pan Arab TV

Genre Wars and the Reality of Pan Arab TV

May 7, 2013
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      Home Opinion

      Genre Wars and the Reality of Pan Arab TV

      Guest Columnist by Guest Columnist
      May 7, 2013
      in Opinion
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      Some of the lucky people reading this may have recently returned from the south of France and MIPTV, where they lunched along the Croisette and attended glittering parties on well-appointed yachts. Or they may have had something more like my own experience of MIP as an exhibitor, and spent three days in a basement, barely […]

      Christopher O’Hearn.

      Some of the lucky people reading this may have recently returned from the south of France and MIPTV, where they lunched along the Croisette and attended glittering parties on well-appointed yachts. Or they may have had something more like my own experience of MIP as an exhibitor, and spent three days in a basement, barely seeing natural light and feeling like a hamster on a treadmill of 20 minute meetings.

      Whatever the experience, MIP TV and MIP COM (does anyone know the difference?) is where the formats and genres of world television are traded. Programmes are bought and sold, and rights are finely balanced. As we enter the season of ‘Big Shows’, we need to look at which shows draw the audiences.

      What’s your genre?

      It is human to look at our neighbours or rivals and think “They’ve got one, I have to get one too, but it must be bigger, faster and more expensive”, channel managers and commissioning editors are no exceptions, they tend to follow the so called popular trends.

      In this region, there is often an assumption that the high drama of Ramadan series is the dominant force. Even outside Ramadan, it is series like Fatma, Harem Al Soltan, Baaet al Waard, Awdet Mohaned and Al Wadaa which are sent to battle on behalf of their broadcasters. They are expensive to produce, time-consuming and take up a significant share of resources, while needing to find advertising budgets to match. Yet, when we look at the audiences for other shows, especially the big reality-entertainment crossover formats such as Arab Idol and X Factor, it is clear that the Arab audience is hungry for entertainment above drama.

      Top Drama shows vs top Reality shows. 

      The figures are a little skewed by the fact that only two episodes of Arab Idol are included. The average will lower over the season, but nevertheless, on an average, the viewing for reality-entertainment shows is actually higher at 36,000 per show versus 21,000 for drama.

      Clearly, reality-entertainment shows are also very expensive, but as the MIP crowd knows, there are many experienced production companies who are very skilled at versioning these formats and creating economies of scale. No wheels have to be invented here.

      They’re also quite creative at working out the financial deals, and the fact that with a proper audience measurement system, we can now deliver a real and measurable ROI. This will help international formats go on a wider range of channels.

      The third genre in this debate is movies. There appears to be an enormous appetite for high-quality movies. From an audience measurement perspective, the movies have the advantage of being relatively short and therefore, they show up highly in

      the ratings.

      Top Movies 

      On this basis, a broadcaster might decide to stop dealing with demanding producers and temperamental stars in favour of the more business-like surroundings of studio-distribution deals.

      But averages don’t tell the whole story. A single showing of a movie will more easily rate better than a series of episodes, which naturally fall up and down.

      Take the top drama programme, Fatma. With an average viewing of 47,000 per show, it looks less attractive than a movie such as Ninja Assassin, which pulled in 62,000. Arab Idol will settle down and probably average around 100-120,000 viewers.

      Ninja Assassin peaked at 99,957 L&A viewers. In the same week, an episode of Fatma peaked at over 140,000 viewers, and it regularly peaks at around 110,000 (on an average). However, they’re both eclipsed by Arab Idol. The first episode of the new series peaked at an amazing 281,000 – not far short of their peak audience for the final in 2012.

      Movies are the ‘Third Man’ here, partly because they have to attract a new audience each time, although the clever scheduler can build up an audience expectation of a certain type or quality of movie at a defined time-slot. MBC 2 works very hard to keep the 10pm and midnight slots with consistent, high-audience movies.

      Scheduling is yet another key player to be considered. The best acquisition team in the world can walk away from Cannes with the jewels of global television, but get the scheduling wrong back home and your ruby will have been thrown into the valley of the wolves. I’ll return to scheduling and targets another day.

      There’s no single conclusion here. I would never have made a good script writer. As the saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, I would rewrite that as, there’s more than one genre to catch an audience.

      The audience will follow the content. Some channels feel that certain genres are not for them, but that’s like fighting a war and deciding that planes aren’t really your thing.

      PAN-ARAB OR NOT

      The final aspect to consider is rights. Those MIP discussions will have involved fine calculations of rights as the producer tries to slice the content into as many parts as possible to maximise their return.

      The simultaneous broadcast of the same show, on different channels, covering the same region does not have any equivalents in any other region of the world. It is unique to this part of the world.

      The recent launch of X Factor, for example, took place on Rotana Khaleejia, MTV Lebanon and CBC Egypt at the same time. What’s interesting is that audiences seem to make their own distinction about the broadcasters and gravitate to the one they prefer. I would love to see pan-Arab figures for this, broken down by country, but as our figures only cover the UAE, unfortunately, we can’t have a definitive analysis.

      What we saw, however, is that a significant number of UAE Expat Arabs chose to watch X Factor on MTV Lebanon.

      X Factor transforms the viewing of an evening almost single-handedly for MTV Lebanon. The channel starts from a low base early in the evening but builds steadily throughout the show.

      How X Factor Transforms Viewing

      Up to that point, the channel’s most significant property was Dancing With the Stars, which had a fairly Lebanese-focused audience. Good figures among the wider Arab expat population for X Factor have not only catapulted the channel up the ranks but also had a halo effect on its other programmes.

      The performance of one show improves the ratings of the entire channel. In the weeks leading up to X Factor, compared to the weeks since X Factor, MTV Lebanon has increased its overall ratings haul by nearly 50% and moved up to just outside the top 10 channels.

      Having said that, Arab Idol is still the big daddy of the reality-entertainment genre. Last year, the final of Arab Idol was the single most watched moment on UAE TV, and from the early signs, it is on course to top the figures again this year, with the possible exception of the final of the Gulf Cup football.

      The lack of pan-Arab figures makes it hard to be definitive about this but there has to be an argument about the presence of Arab Idol on a single network, MBC, rather than the divided approach of X Factor. Only the producers can say what made the best commercial sense but it would be fascinating to know how they compared. My guess based on the behaviour we see in the UAE, which is, in many ways, a microcosm of the region, would be that the single-channel, pan-Arab approach had more total viewers than the multi-channel strategy.

      Christopher O’Hearn is General Manager of Emirates Media Measurement Company, which has rolled out ‘tview’, the UAE’s new television ratings and audience measurement system, and the first in the Middle East.

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