Warner Bros. Discovery will hold initial team meetings with recent affiliate OSN Streaming from Dubai to determine the type of original content it will invest in and develop from the Middle East.
They hope to solve the riddle streamers have been battling for years – what type of Arabic content will engage viewers. Their answer starts with a particular model for local content.
These planning sessions take place a month after the US media and entertainment conglomerate acquired a one third stake in the Dubai streamer in a $57 million deal. It then expanded its offering to include Discovery+ on OSN Streaming (OSN+) in early April, and a week later, opened up its 77th global market in Turkey with HBO Max available on BluTv.
This plays into Warner Bros' mission to become one of the top three streamers, according to its regional executive, and the Middle East is a significant step in its global roll-out.
Jamie Cooke, executive vice president and managing director for Central Europe, Turkey and the Middle East at Warner Bros, said the way his company chose to break into the already crowded regional streaming market was to integrate into the existing audience of a reliable partner that provides premium content.
Now, he said, the next step is to figure out how it will differentiate itself from others and what kind of content will stand out, and drive engagement. "We don't really have a concrete plan," Mr Cooke told The National, with the ink just dried on the partnership and discussions starting this week.
"What we want to try to replicate here, is to bring the Warner HBO stamp of quality to the content in terms of stories," he said. The way to do that, he explained, is by producing material that succeeds with local audiences instead of pursuing global hits from the start.
executive vice president and managing director for Central Europe, Turkey and the Middle East at Warner Bros
"We have this phrase that we use called multi-local," he said, which has proven a successful model in other parts of the world. "Where once a story succeeds in a particular country, we try to see if it resonates in another and give it the needed funding to travel," he added.
"We've tried in the past to produce something from here that works everywhere," Mr Cooke said. "It's very hard. If you try to create something for the world [from the start]. It means nothing to everyone."
Based on his intuition about the region, Arabic-language historical dramas are where he sees the possibility to create something that could click with audiences, and possibly globally given the appetite from viewers.
Arab demand
Global media and entertainment companies have been making moves in the Middle East over the last decade with the goal of tapping into the young market and its potential for significant returns.
"They've identified just the way the rest of us have, that Arabic-language content, Mena content generally, is growing at a rapid pace," said Hussein Fakhri, chief commercial officer at Doha's Katara Studios, an independent film and TV studio that focuses on Arabic-language content. "Obviously, they want to capitalise on that," he told The National.
Demand for Arabic content from the Middle East grew 16 times from 2020 to 2024, according to a November white paper by the global entertainment analytics company Parrot Analytics and Rise Studios.
Data was compiled using a host of direct and indirect sources including search engines, wikis and informational sites, fan and critic rating sites, social media platforms, peer-to-peer apps and open streaming platforms.
"This isn't just regional momentum – it's a global wave," said the company's director of insights, EMEA, Amit Devani, in a LinkedIn post in March. International demand growth for Arabic content was only slightly less than that for local content, at 13-fold during the same period, he added.
Arabic crime dramas and thrillers, family-friendly series and also reality shows coming from the Middle East were being embraced by international viewers, the white paper stated.
Yet a major gap lies in Arabic content capacity for growth, given the immaturity of its streaming content ecosystem, which gives it a growth potential that lags behind other non-English heavyweights such as Hindi and Chinese.
This reveals a major opportunity for investors to step in and reap the rewards of building the development ecosystem, especially as demand for international content like English and Turkish productions is on the decline, according to the 2025 report.
"As platforms expand, the trend towards local Arabic content has become a critical growth strategy, with both regional and global players increasingly investing in original Arabic programming," it stated, leaving streaming entities vying for a first-mover advantage, regionally and globally.
Market of opportunity
Global players who entered the market early include Amazon Prime Video and Netflix in 2016, with the latter producing original Arabic-language content in 2019 with a supernatural series called Jinn and AlRawabi School for Girls in 2021, which achieved global success. Disney+ entered in April 2020 through a distribution deal with OSN, but then launched in 2022 as a standalone service
Last week, the US film and TV production company Miramax TV announced its regional head, who will work with writers and local producers to develop original projects with local talent and adapt Miramax Library IP into Arabic-language series, according to the entertainment news platform Deadline.
Warner Bros HBO Max, now Max, first partnered with OSN in 2016, and its relationship and presence in the region has grown.
"Now, the advantage I think they have is that OSN has positioned itself quite well as premium, really, sort of high-end content," said Mr Fakhri. "And that's a space that is wide open."
Mr Cooke said this need for quality is a "huge factor" and extends beyond storytelling, to the marketing and technical ease of use of streaming platforms.
"Consumers expect low friction. They expect high-quality video streaming. They expect it to simply work," he said. This is one of the things that was appealing about OSN's platform, he said, and its merger with regional home-grown brand Anghami in 2023 that brought in "world-class" technical prowess.
With that, Warner Bros is looking to ask the vital questions in its early talks taking place this week.
"Our teams are together talking about ... what content is working in the market. Where's a USP [unique selling point] for us to kind of position ourselves? What are the kind of production models that we might want to adopt to do that?."
Also in addressing the development gap, he added: "How do we bring in our expertise from global to come and help with that?"
"That's the next phase," said Mr Cooke. "I think that it's incumbent on us to help the industry develop that."
