The content king of MENA

The MENA region is booming with sports and gaming content, but as Paul Skeldon finds out, success in this booming market comes with caveats

The MENA market is a hotbed of telemedia services right now. Having embraced smartphones and digital content services with alacrity in the past decade, the region is where the most rapid growth is happening and where some of the biggest opportunities lie.

Podcasts, games and video services are, as they are everywhere, extremely popular, while sports content – both domestically in the markets within MENA and international sport content – is becoming very popular.

The user base is certainly there, but there are challenges.

Naji Bou Habib, founder & CEO of MT2, meanwhile, believes that while mass market content and VOD services, games and podcasts are doing great business, there are challenges with acquisition and advertising costs, as well as taking payments.

“Business is posting growth in the Middle East, however there are some threats to the market,” he says. “The market is being driven by new content services and we can also say that we are on an ‘up wave’ with carrier and regulators much more interested. There are codes of conduct and rules that drive the market. But there are challenges.

“Our region is very juicy and competition is very high, which reduces margins and pushes up acquisition and advertising costs. Operators want to aggregate the market, appointing just one or two aggregators that MNOs want to deal with. But this can bring in a conflict of interest and can impact companies that want to make their own content and push that.”

“There are also issues with how data is managed and used by many operators. Some markets are kind of private hunting areas that are very hard to enter for political reasons.,” he adds. “This isn’t just a problem in MENA, this is a problem everywhere in the developing markets, where there are lack of laws protecting copyright and business ownership.”

Samuel Chiwanda from Malawi’s Click Mobile agrees. He says that while the market is starting to boom, issues with operators, regulation and in particular revenue shares in carrier billing, are all making growth across Africa more tentative.

“It is a strong market, but it is a new market and MNOs, regulators, government and the banking sector don’t make it easy to operate,” he warns. “The consumer base may not be ‘developing’, but the market itself certainly is.”