Televisions have been in widespread use in many countries for over fifty years; surprisingly, though, TV viewing habits largely haven’t changed with the rise of the internet in the 1990s and 2000s.
But the recent rise of on-demand streaming services and the introduction of smart TVs stands to finally impact people’s relationships with their TVs. On-demand internet based services have massively expanded customers’ choice of content available in family living rooms. California-based Netflix expects to hit close to 50 million worldwide subscribers this year, having increasing its customer base five-fold in as many years.
For Samer Abdin, CEO and co-founder of Dubai-based online video service Istikana, the rise of these services worldwide was an exciting development that had largely bypassed TV in the Arab world.
“Tareq [Abu-Lughod, COO and co-founder] and I were sitting around in the summer of 2010 talking about Netflix and all the fun stuff going on in the US, and we started complaining about the fact that there wasn’t something similar over here for Arabic content,” said Abdin.
In the following months the two started to sign content and develop the basic website before launching a free advertising-based service in 2011.
“Tareq has been in content for a long time and he phoned a few friends and pitched the idea to them. The feedback was good, we started to sign some content deals and in parallel getting the technology sorted out,” said Abdin.
Adopting a lean approach, the two pushed out their minimum viable product as soon as it was ready, iterating the ad-based model as they went. “Integrating everything with an ad system that worked really smoothly did take some thinking. Once we got it consumer-ready we pushed it out, while continuing iterations on the product.”
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Istikana vying against fierce competition to be the Netflix for the region
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