ASBU BroadcastPro Summit a resounding success

More than 280 attendees from the MENA broadcast industry gathered together for the ASBU BroadcastPro Summit, which was held at The Address Dubai Marina on November 12.

Dr. Riyadh Najm, President of General Commission for Audiovisual Media, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, kicked off the summit with a welcome speech.

This was followed by a keynote from Mohammed Akhlaq, Director of International Operations at Al Jazeera Network and Launch Director – Technology and Operations at Al Jazeera America. Akhlaq, who led the AJAM operations team, not only offered us exclusive insights into some of the challenges the network faced in the US; he also screened a special and exclusive documentary at the Summit from Al Jazeera under embargo. The documentary, which had its first showing at the ASBU BroadcastPro Summit and Awards, was strictly for attendees.

“This was a great honour for us and we are very thankful to Al Jazeera, for taking the time and the effort to share a special documentary with other professionals in the MENA region on the technical challenges that the Al Jazeera America launch team underwent,” commented Vijaya Cherian, Group Editor of BroadcastPro Middle East.

“This is the first showing of this documentary. The fact that it was an exclusive screening meant that those who didn’t attend the keynote missed it as Al Jazeera still hasn’t made this documentary available in the public domain.”

The summit included only one other presentation, which was from Mahesh Jaishankar of du datamena on how Internet Exchanges (UAE-IX) offer broadcasters an option and solution to optimise and extend their reach.

It covered how the UAE IX presents opportunities for content providers, broadcasters and media companies with a platform to reach out to Middle East audiences.

Besides this, the summit included five panel discussions, which brought together senior executives from each of their respective fields.

For the first time, the ASBU BroadcastPro ME Summit included a production panel but this included people who facilitated productions in the region such as Dubai TV and Film Commission and twofour54, as well as those who commissioned and made TV programmes such as representatives from MBC, DMI and Sync Media.

Besides this, OTT heads from OSN, icflix, Intigral, MBC and Selevision came together to discuss the opportunities for multi-platform delivery and what business models would work best to generate maximum revenue. Lots of statistics were revealed and some of the key takeaways from this panel were convenience and affordability and the importance of marketing to make online platforms more visible to TV audiences.

The 4K panel, which was sponsored by Ericsson, brought together broadcast heads from OSN and MBC with 4K experts from Ericsson and Eutelsat to discuss various formats and the challenges around 4K delivery. Robert Taylor, who is Programming Head of the Al Jazeera Work Transformation Project moderated this discussion beautifully and the panel came to the conclusion that 4K was indeed a reality although mass consumption would take between five and seven years.

There was an interesting debate following this between telcos who operate in the broadcast space and Nick Grande, MD of ChannelSculptor led this discussion with representatives from du, Etisalat and Vubiquity.

The final discussion for the day brought together a fantastic line-up of CEOs  from OSN, Zee Entertainment MENA & Pakistan, Rotana and My-HD. Dr. Riyadh Najm, President at General Commission for Audiovisual Media, KSA was part of this panel, which was moderated by the UAE TV audience measurement guru Chris O’Hearn.

This was followed by some lovely raffle prizes including ipad Air tablets, ipad minis, cameras, National Geographic bags, special chairs for broadcast professionals working at their desk for long hours as well as home printers.

The summit concluded at 5 pm and guests returned at 7.30 pm for the ASBU BroadcastPro Awards.

“This has been our most successful event to date,” commented Cherian.