Telecom & Media
MENA’s media and streaming landscape is booming. The region’s OTT market grew 35% year-over-year in 2025, driven by local original content, sports rights, and improving broadband penetration. Shahid,
MENA’s media and streaming landscape is booming. The region’s OTT market grew 35% year-over-year in 2025, driven by local original content, sports rights, and improving broadband penetration. Shahid, StarzPlay, and OSN are competing fiercely for subscriber share. Al Arabiya, Asharq News, and regional broadcasters are fighting for digital engagement in a fragmenting media environment. Music platforms like Anghami and Wavo are scaling across Arabic-speaking audiences. But growth has created a paradox. To win, these companies need more content, faster, in more languages and formats than ever before. They need real-time news updates, personalized recommendations, live sports highlights, multilingual dubbing, and algorithmic ad targeting—all running simultaneously across markets with vastly different regulatory frameworks and audience preferences. The old model—human newsrooms, centralized editorial teams, manual content workflows—can’t scale to meet this demand. By 2026, leading MENA media companies are deploying generative AI throughout their operations. Those that do it intelligently will dominate. Those that don’t will struggle to compete.
AI is transforming how news is reported, packaged, and distributed. At major newsrooms like MBC, Asharq News, and Al Arabiya, generative AI is handling routine content creation: brief summaries of wire service reports, first drafts of business updates, translation of breaking news into multiple languages, and real-time fact-checking against published sources. The impact on editorial workflow is dramatic. A newsroom that used to require two hours to translate a breaking story into Arabic, English, and French can now do it in minutes. Journalists previously assigned to repetitive rewriting can focus on investigation and analysis. The editorial team can double down on what humans do best—judgment, contextual reporting, and accountability—while AI handles the commoditized parts of the workflow. Asharq News has experimented with AI-generated Arabic business summaries that feed into their digital publication workflow. Early results show a 50% reduction in time-to-publish for routine updates, freeing reporters to chase harder stories. Al Arabiya is testing similar systems for sports coverage and event recaps. This capability isn’t risk-free. Accuracy, hallucination, and bias are persistent challenges. AI systems can confidently generate plausible but false information. Local context and cultural nuance are often missed. The frameworks matter enormously: newsrooms need clear policies on which content types can be AI-generated, mandatory human review protocols, and transparent disclosure to audiences about AI involvement.
Arabic content originals represent a crucial differentiator for MENA streaming platforms. But translating a single show into multiple Arabic dialects, plus English subtitles and dubbed audio, is expensive and slow. A 10-episode season could take months to fully localize. Shahid, StarzPlay, and OSN are deploying AI-powered translation and dubbing systems that can generate high-quality Arabic-language content in days, not months. These systems go beyond simple machine translation—they preserve tone, cultural references, humor, and regional dialect preferences. Anghami, the region’s leading music streaming platform, is using similar technology to create multilingual versions of music content metadata and to auto-generate personalized playlist descriptions. Wavo, the Arabic music production platform, is exploring AI-powered production tools that help independent artists create higher-quality tracks without expensive studio time. The technology is advancing rapidly. By early 2026, AI dubbing quality had improved to the point where it was approaching human quality for certain content types and languages. The cost had dropped to a fraction of human dubbing. The risk, of course, is that AI dubbing removes a layer of cultural curation—a skilled human dubber makes choices about how to adapt content for a specific market. Fully automating this process can result in generic, culturally flattened content. The winning approach combines AI efficiency with human creative direction: AI generates the first pass, native speakers review and refine, and creative leads make final calls on how content should feel for each market.
Streaming platforms live and die by engagement. A personalized experience that keeps viewers on the platform for three hours instead of one is worth millions in subscriber lifetime value. Shahid, StarzPlay, and OSN have deployed ML-driven recommendation engines, but these are increasingly being enhanced with generative AI. AI systems can now:Generate personalized content summaries and descriptions that match individual viewing patterns and preferences, Create dynamic playlists and collections that feel curated rather than algorithmic, Predict which shows a viewer is most likely to complete (and intervene with personalized marketing if engagement drops), Tailor content discovery experiences for different user segments (discovery-focused vs. binge-focused viewers, regional preferences, age groups)The result is a more engaging user experience. Metrics from regional streaming platforms show that AI-enhanced recommendation engines increase time-on-platform by 15-25% compared to traditional algorithms alone. The tradeoff is transparency and control. As recommendation systems become more sophisticated, users often feel less in control of what they’re shown. Some MENA markets have stricter expectations around content recommendations than others—government-owned or government-adjacent platforms face different pressures than consumer-focused services. The frameworks here matter: clear audience controls, interpretable recommendations, and cultural appropriateness checks are essential.
Advertising is the business model for many MENA broadcasters and online publishers. AI is transforming how ads are targeted, placed, and priced. AI-powered ad-tech systems can now analyze content in real-time and dynamically insert ads in ways that feel natural and appropriate. They can predict which ads will resonate with individual viewers, optimize ad spend across platforms, and detect ad fraud. This intelligence drives higher CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) for publishers and better ROI for advertisers. MBC and other major broadcast networks have begun deploying these systems. The payoff is substantial—a 20-30% improvement in ad revenue per viewer for early adopters. The flip side: AI-powered content creation has accelerated copyright and IP infringement issues. Deepfakes of news anchors, unauthorized reproductions of shows, and AI-generated content claiming to be original are becoming more common. MENA broadcasters and streaming platforms are deploying AI-powered detection and watermarking systems to protect their IP. Asharq News and Al Arabiya have implemented AI-based monitoring to detect unauthorized reproductions of their content. Shahid and OSN are experimenting with digital watermarking and blockchain-based IP provenance tracking. These systems aren’t perfect, but they’re a necessary defensive measure in a world where content can be generated and distributed frictionlessly.
MENA’s media operates under complex regulatory frameworks. Content suitability, linguistic authenticity, and cultural appropriateness are not just business decisions—they’re governance requirements in many markets. AI-generated content that violates these frameworks creates existential risk. A news organization that accidentally publishes AI-generated misinformation faces not just editorial embarrassment but potential regulatory penalties. A streaming platform that recommends culturally inappropriate content due to algorithmic bias can lose licenses. This is why the best-practice MENA media companies aren’t just deploying AI—they’re building governance frameworks around it. Clear policies on AI-generated vs. human-created content, mandatory review processes, cultural sensitivity training for the teams that tune and monitor these systems, and transparency with audiences about where AI is involved.
Deploying AI across newsrooms and streaming platforms requires capabilities across three dimensions: Technology comes first. Building recommendation engines, content generation tools, and personalization systems requires expertise in LLMs, recommendation algorithms, real-time inference, and data infrastructure. Our Studios engine is built to help media companies design and deploy these customer-facing experiences. We help newsrooms think through the architecture of GenAI-powered editorial workflows, and streaming platforms architect recommendation systems that are both effective and culturally appropriate. Operational excellence is the second layer. Newsrooms and streaming platforms operating at scale need to run these AI systems reliably, monitor them for bias and hallucination, and integrate them seamlessly into existing editorial and product workflows. This is operational engineering work. Our Octopus engine—embedded engineering at scale—helps media organizations build the operational discipline and infrastructure required to run AI systems reliably in production. Governance and policy is often overlooked but critical. MENA media companies need clear frameworks around when AI can be used, how to review and audit AI-generated content, how to protect intellectual property, and how to comply with local regulatory frameworks. These policies need to be embedded into the platform, not bolted on afterward. We help media organizations design and codify these frameworks. The cultural and people dimension is equally important. Newsrooms and content teams need to be upskilled on what AI can and cannot do. Editorial leaders need to understand the governance implications. Product teams need to learn how to design AI-driven experiences responsibly. This is hard organizational change—it’s not just about tools.
The MENA media landscape is consolidating. Platforms that can produce more content faster, in more languages, at higher quality, and with better personalization will win. Those that don’t will shrink. AI is the lever that makes this possible. But AI alone isn’t enough. The winners will be the ones that combine AI capability with editorial excellence, cultural intelligence, and governance discipline. For newsrooms and media companies across the region, the question isn’t whether to adopt AI—it’s how quickly and thoughtfully they can do it.
By 2027, AI-enhanced newsrooms and streaming platforms will be the norm in MENA, not the exception. The companies that have already scaled these capabilities—Shahid, StarzPlay, MBC, Asharq News—will have significant competitive advantages. The laggards will face pressure. The opportunity is enormous. MENA’s media market is young, growing, and underserved by global platforms. The region’s unique content needs, regulatory environment, and audience preferences create space for innovative, AI-powered solutions built specifically for MENA. The race is on. The winners will be the ones moving fastest, thinking most carefully, and building the most trustworthy systems.
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