Rotana leaving Beirut

Rotana Music decided to leave its production facilities in Beirut-Lebanon and move to Amman-Jordan.

This big event (Beirut has been the historic base of Rotana) happens after important changes in Rotana, following the grouping of LBC Sat and Rotana's selling capacities (well actually a semi-merger, view my other posts on Rotana) Many of Rotana's most successful programs will actually be broadcasted on LBC (and probably produced in LBC's production facility in Adma-Lebanon) The rest (production wise) will move to Jordan.

The other reason is that Rotana's programs used to be produced at StudioVision's facilities. StudioVision's owners (Murr family) are reopening their own TV channel (MTV) and will also probably need a large part of the facilities.

To add spice to the issue, MTV is reportedly backed by Antoine Choueiri; Choueiri who lost the LBC media representation contract to...Rotana's RMS (Rotana Media Services) => Rotana had to leave StudioVision (MTV)'s facilities.

Radio wars

In one of the rare cases in the calm world of radio stations in the Middle East, Lebanon's Sawt el Ghad, "stole" one of Voice of Lebanon (VDL or Sawt Loubnan) 's stars: Monique Bassil Zaarour.

Monique Bassila Zaarour is a very popular nutrition expert. She has published books and manages nutrition clinics)

VDL promptly replaced her by Sawssan Wazen Jabri, a very successful nutrition/business women (she owns the Nutrition Diet Center in various Arab countries)

If we consider the huge number of phone calls received by both programs, no doubt dieting is a booming business in Lebanon!

SMS messaging on TV

Last week Egypt based Melody Hits decided to stop broadcasting the sms (text) messages sent by its viewers (on the bottom of the screen)

The channel announced that it was responding to demands by viewers. Interestingly, Melody relies (besides the cash creator music management business) on advertising revenues. The channel probably decided that sms revenues were too low; by scraping them out, it can now sell this "clean screen" to advertisers. Rotana (its main competitor) gained LBC Sat in its advertising portfolio, Melody (whose advertising is managed by Antoine Choueiri, who also used to represent LBC) needs to respond to its competitor's improved sale capacity. If competing with Rotana, means stopping on-screen sms, then be it!

New licences in Kuwait

The Kuwaiti ministry of information approved 10 new licenses for daily political newspapers. Kuwait now has 28 political dailies! Out of which only 18 are actually published (15 in Arabioc and 3 in English)

The main newspapers are:
Al Balad
AnNasher
Al Akhbar
Al Kuwait
Al Zaman
Al La3eb

MTV to reopen

Now that the divorce between Antoine Choueiri group and LBC Group is done, and after resolving the last political problems, our website has learned that MTV will announce next week that it will resume broadcasting.

The probable date is the 23rd of January

Morocco's Amazight channel

Morocco announced that a new government owned channel will start broadcasting within the first nine months. The channel will be named the "National Amazight TV" .

The budget announced for the channel is relatively low, as Moroccoan communications minister announced that it will equal 4.5MEuros over 4 years!!!! That's probably enough to pay a dozen of employees, but shows that programming quality will be very week (a minimal yearly budget for a "respectable" channel stands at around $15M)

PS: Amazight is one of the languages of the "Berber" tribes mainly present in Morocco and Algeria.

BBC Persian

After BBC Persian radio (broadcasting since 1941), BBC announced last week that it was launching a new TV channel : BBC Persian with a budget of 15 Million pounds (source: Guardian)
the channel will have 140 employees.

This BBC Persian TV comes after BBC's arabic experience, where a TV channel was successfully launched in parallel to the radio service.