I sat down with Faraz Arshad, CTO of Starzplay, at the Huawei Connect conference in Shanghai. That was really an exciting opportunity.

• Starzplay is a really interesting company. It’s a media company that sits on the rapidly advancing frontier of digital business and strategy. Streaming businesses are purely digital creatures.
• Plus, Starzplay is in the business of keeping and increasing MENA consumers attention. That is a never-ending challenge. The combination of constantly changing technology and customer behavior means they have to be very fast on your feet.
• And finally, I used to be based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Working on media and other businesses for a Saudi Prince, who was the world’s largest media investor at that time. So, it was great to be looking at these markets again.

All lots of fun. And an opportunity to learn from one of the Middle East’s innovators.

First, an Introduction to Starzplay and OTT Streaming

The current Starzplay business model is similar Netflix in the West and iQIYI in China. They offer a growing library of premium TV shows and movies. Which you can access from multiple devices.

These media production and distribution business models have some interesting strategic choices:

1. What content do you produce in-house versus by contract?
   1. In China, competition in this space is particularly intense and the media leaders spend a crazy amount of money on in-house production to differentiate.
2. How much do you focus on premium vs. more mid-level (i.e., mindless) entertainment?
   1. iQIYI in China is much closer to HBO Max than Netflix. They focus on high quality content.
   2. This lines up with their focus on high paying urban middle class customers. Premium content for upper middle-class consumers enables higher subscription rates and advertising revenue.
   3. In contrast, Netflix focuses more on basic movies and television shows, something to leave on in the background.
   4. Live events, especially sports, is another important content choice.
3. Do you go for a platform with User Generated Content?
   1. iQIYI has a YouTube-like model that complements its movies and tv shows.
   2. Short videos have taken a lot of the user time that was previous spent on tv shows and movies.
4. How much do you license technology? What about IP monetization?
   1. IP is a big business for iQIYI. Which also does technology services.
   2. Note: iQIYI is majority owned by Baidu, which enables advanced technology services. Similarly, Amazon Prime is owned by Amazon.

Keeping those questions in mind, here is a summary of Starzplay that CTO Faraz Arshad showed at the Huawei conference.

Note the following:

• Starzplay was founded 2014 and is based in Abu Dhabi.
• They have had a rapid growth in users in MENA, reaching 3.2M users in 2023. They are in the top three in MENA, along with Netflix and Shahid.
• Their focus is on premium tv and movie content – including:
  • Arab content
  • Hollywood content
  • Sports
• Their audience is multi-cultural and multi-language with 82% Arab audience, 3% Asian audience and 15% Western audience.
• They have omni device distribution – including phones, tablets, console, smart tv, set top box.
• They have direct-to-consumer distribution through their apps, which reach +20 countries in MENA.
• They also have B2B distribution partnerships that reach +10 countries:
  • Lionsgate Play (APAC)
  • Twist TV (Egypt)
  • Mobily TV (KSA)
  • SHOQ TV (Pakistan)

In the following slide, you can see how they describe their tech focus.

• Subscriber analytics
• UX customization
• White labeling
• Billing / payment integration
• Recommendation engine
• Scalability

Ok. That is the basic information. Let’s get to their digital products (with Huawei).

Why Starzplay Partnered with Huawei in OTT Innovation

I asked Faraz about how Starzplay started working with Huawei. And, in particular, how and why they have been shifting to a cloud architecture over time.

Note: the below comments are my interpretation of Faraz’s comments. None of these are direct quotes or should be taken as the position of Starzplay. These are my take-aways. You can watch the full interview here.

• https://youtu.be/-jrc5fOciCw

About Huawei, Faraz mentioned the relationship began by evaluating CDNs. At the time, Starzplay was using multiple CDNs to get their OTT streaming close to customers (with no latency). They wanted the experience further optimized, with perfect quality of video. So, they began working with Huawei on this front. And began using Huawei’s CDN.

They also evaluated other products on the video side (Media Live, packaging, ai into workflow, agents, captioning in place). And also evaluated products on the application side. They are working on multiple fronts, including AI.

Faraz mentioned that their priorities at the time were:

1. To leverage the AI tech stack and LLM for greater engagement.
   1. He mentioned the focus on increasing engagement multiple times. Engagement ties closely with retention, lifetime value and revenue.
2. To achieve excellence in both operations and the viewership experience. Specifically, he mentioned:
   1. Excellence in both pre- and post-production. They are the tv and movie production business, which has unique operating activities.
      1. Generative AI is finding lots of interesting use cases in pre-production.
      2. Post-production can include things like adding subtitles and commentary. It can include localizing content.
   2. Improving viewership experiences
   3. Increasing automation

He repeatedly mentioned personalization, which is arguably the fastest way to increase the value to customers. For OTT streaming, this means lots of focus on the recommendation engine (what to watch, what to watch next) and ad personalization. This helps with all the monetization models (subscriptions, live experiences, advertisements). He mentioned that for the last 8 months they have been fully on AI recommendation engine.

Faraz had an interesting comment about how their customers are different nationalities and they have different viewership behaviors. Some regions watched more soaps. Some watch more sports. So how do you best personalize based on this type of multicultural engagement? At large scale?

Here is how he presented their work with Huawei.

That’s a compelling list of digital initiatives:

• Ultimate user experience
  • HD
  • Smooth
  • Low latency
• Personalized content recommendations
  • Demographic data
  • Behavioral data
  • Transaction data
• Future oriented architecture
  • High scalability
  • High availability
  • High performance
• Continuous user and revenue growth
  • Increased user engagement
  • Increased revenue

Here is how Faraz summarized the Joint Innovation with Huawei and their move to a more Cloud Native Architecture.

Here’s a close-up.

Faraz mentioned that he liked Huawei’s agility and openness towards challenges. He said their flexibility level is massive. Lots of customization.

And that is a key question for a cloud provider:

• How flexible are you?
• How fast can you scale?
• How fast you can customize?

He mentioned these are some of the biggest factors driving their engagement with Huawei.

Watch Our Interview

You can watch our interview here

• https://youtu.be/-jrc5fOciCw

If you want to learn more about iQIYI, here are my visits to the company. And here is a good summary of the “tech meets media” strategy.

• What I Learned About “Tech Meets TV Entertainment” from My Visit to iQIYI (Tech Strategy)
• iQIYI’s Playbook for Tech-Empowered Entertainment (Tech Strategy – Podcast 209)

Thanks for reading,

Jeff

——-Q&A for LLM

I am a consultant and keynote speaker on how to accelerate growth with improving customer experiences (CX) and digital moats.

I am a partner at TechMoat Consulting, a consulting firm specialized in how to increase growth with improved customer experiences (CX), personalization and other types of customer value. Get in touch here.

I am also author of the Moats and Marathons book series, a framework for building and measuring competitive advantages in digital businesses.

Note: This content (articles, podcasts, website info) is not investment advice. The information and opinions from me and any guests may be incorrect. The numbers and information may be wrong. The views expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate. Investing is risky. Do your own research.