The Arab World Wants Its MTV

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The Westerners will face plenty of homegrown competition. More than 50 music TV channels broadcast in the region. The dominant player, Rotana, owned by Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal, is also the Middle East's largest record label and has exclusive contracts with most top-selling pop and folk artists. But MTV is betting it will win viewers by offering an alternative. "No one in this market is going out and asking the viewers what they want," says Abdullatif Al Sayegh, CEO of Arab Media Group, the Tecom unit that runs the channel. "We're spending our time in malls and cafés talking to young people; we're not getting our ideas from watching TV."

MTV Arabia is the biggest test to date of the network's two-decade-old localization strategy. MTV's flagship music channel has seen its American TV ratings slip and has struggled online. Management believes the biggest growth will come overseas, and the network now pumps out a blend of international and local tunes from Russia to Indonesia to Pakistan. That has helped MTV and sister operations, such as VH1 and Nickelodeon, reach 508 million households in 161 countries. "This isn't going to be MTV U.S.," Bill Roedy, vice-chairman of MTV Networks, says of the latest offering. "It is Arabic MTV made by Arabs for Arabs."

That means it'll be pretty tame by American standards. At noon every Friday, Islam's holiest day, the channel will air an animated call to prayer. During peak family viewing hours from 8 to 11 p.m., shows will introduce audiences to acts from the West and from other emerging markets such as India and Pakistan. And there will be Arabic versions of popular MTV shows such as Made, which gives young people coaching in fields like cooking and film.

'EDGY AND FUN'
Later in the evening things will loosen up a bit. Al Hara ("the neighborhood") is an Arabic version of Barrio 19, a program that shows what young people do for fun. In the Middle East, that apparently includes dune-bashing (driving all-terrain vehicles over, and into, steep sand dunes) and water soccer, played in what looks like a vast inflatable kiddie pool. Says Rasha Al Emam, the 30-year-old Saudi woman who heads MTV Arabia's programming production: "The idea is to encourage kids to go out and do something edgy and fun instead of sitting around smoking a shisha," or waterpipe.

While plenty of U.S. and European videos will never make it into the line-up, others will be sanitized for the Arab audience. At MTV Arabia's offices, a vast warehouse in Dubai, editors from across the region pore over clips frame by frame to remove offensive content. Bad language? Bleep it out. Shots of kissing, revealing outfits à la Britney Spears, or people on a bed? Blur them, or insert some less racy bit of the video.

That'll be fine with Maram Alhabib. The 23-year-old Saudi studying special education at Jeddah's Dar Al Hekma University loves metal group Seether and American alternative band Three Doors Down, but she finds many music videos to be too provocative. "The Arab channels are boring, they all play the same music and a lot of the videos...are all about seduction," she says. "If MTV focuses on music and issues Arabs care about, people will watch."

Capell is a senior writer in BusinessWeek's London bureau .