Arabic IPTV: television for the Arab world and MENA region

The single most common failure in Arabic television packages is treating the Arab world as one audience. A Moroccan household watches Maghrebi channels in Darija and follows French-language news; a Kuwaiti household watches Gulf channels in Khaleeji Arabic and follows the regional sports tier; an Egyptian household watches the Cairo private networks; an Iraqi household wants national and Kurdish channels. Sell any of them a generic 500-channel Arabic bouquet and most of what they receive is irrelevant to them, while the twenty channels they actually watch are missing.

DrexTV carries Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, Iraqi and Maghrebi line-ups as separate groups in the electronic programme guide, covering the national broadcasters of 22 Arab states alongside the major pan-Arab entertainment families. The grouping matters as much as the count: it means a subscriber browses their own region's forty or fifty channels rather than scrolling through three thousand entries to find the evening news. Arabic subtitle and audio tracks run across much of the on-demand catalogue as well, including on non-Arabic content.

Arabic broadcasting reorganises itself for Ramadan. New drama series — the musalsalat commissioned specifically for the month — premiere across the major networks, prime time shifts to after iftar, and the late-evening peak extends past midnight. It is the most important month of the broadcast year in this market, and it is the month when most providers' programme guides quietly become fiction, because they keep serving the standard-season grid. Our guide is rebuilt on the Ramadan schedule, and our regional capacity is provisioned for the extended late peak rather than the usual evening window.

The second thing this market needs is a single account that works in two places at once. There are roughly 3.7 million Arab Americans, half a million Arab Canadians and 400,000 Arab British residents, and the standard solution — a local pay-TV contract for the country you live in, plus a satellite dish or a second subscription for home-country channels — is both expensive and, in most apartment leases, not actually permitted. On DrexTV the full Arabic tier and the complete local line-up of your country of residence sit on the same login. The adult content package is disabled by default on every account and is only ever enabled on explicit request.