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 Look out Dubai, look out Abu Dhabi – Saudi’s coming to getcha, at least in media city terms, that is.
According to The National, among the plans for Saudi Arabia’s Economic Cities is a media city-within-a-city, to bring more of that media goodness back to the country which is, ultimately, paying for most of it.
The media zone would be part of King Abdullah Economic City, the flagship EC development in the kingdom at the moment. Part of the vision for the Economic Cities is for them to act as free zones, to a greater or lesser extent, where some of Saudi Arabia’s more, ahem, restrictive laws might not apply so strictly.
This opens up the Cities to all sorts of industries, particularly those based around knowledge exchange and participation (much of which is slated to happen in Knowledge Economic City, just outside Madinah, incidentally) including media, which typically enjoys something of a louche lifestyle.
What? Oh come on, we all know it’s true. Let’s not kid ourselves here.
Anyway, regional media players are making positive noises about the putative Saudi development.
“They have said they are planning a media zone, and when the media zone is in place with the regulatory environment that has been described, that will clearly be attractive for all our productions which we are already doing in Saudi, but would be a lot easier to execute,” said MBC’s general manager and COO Sam Barnett, quoted in The National.
And AT Kearney consultant Matthieu De Clercq told the paper: “All the big media companies today are Saudi-owned – Rotana, ART, MBC – and the big market is Saudi Arabia. So there is a clear question that needs to be asked, and that is why can we not bring some of those back to Saudi Arabia?”
On the other hand, Rotana itself said it had no particular interest in joining in with the media city fun – although to be fair it already has well-established operations in Saudi Arabia.
The National reports that specifics are thin on the ground, with comments from government officials remaining vague and general: “soon” is not a timetable for action.
On the face of it, a Saudi Arabian media city might seem a tall order: press freedom, let alone freedom of speech, is non-existent, and laws around personal interaction and personal freedom – especially for women – are, well, not attractive to many people, to say the least.
But if the country were to circumvent or even permanently squash some of these problems, a Saudi Media City would be a significant threat to the gulf’s still-developing media hubs of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar, to an extent.
After all, in a country which values personal interactions, why sit hundreds of miles away when you could be at the heart of the action?
Watch this space.
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