Streaming and Analytics Fuel Gulf’s Media & Content Boom

The entertainment and media industry in the Gulf region is accelerating its transformation with streaming growth, enhanced analytics and an increasing number of strategic infrastructure investments. Two recent developments illustrate this trend.

Streaming growth in the Gulf

The streaming-video market across the Middle East & North Africa (including GCC) is projected to reach around US $1.5 billion by end-2025, with subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) users expected to surpass 27 million. Campaign Middle East For advertisers and content owners, this signals a shift in audience behaviour and monetisation opportunities. More viewers are migrating from linear TV to on-demand, and advertisers are repositioning accordingly.

Analytics and infrastructure catch-up

In Qatar, the Qatar Media City (Media City) Film Committee has partnered with global analytics-firm Parrot Analytics to enable creators and producers to access world-leading audience-analytics, concept-testing and casting-tools — a move intended to raise success-rates of regional content in global markets. The Peninsula Newspaper

What’s driving the growth?

Business and market implications

For content creators and streaming platforms: there is a clear opportunity to develop Gulf-centric content with global appeal — leveraging analytics to optimise genre, casting and distribution.
For advertisers: The streaming migration means rethinking media-buying, audience targeting and content sponsorship. Gulf markets are growing in importance for regional campaigns.
For investors and infrastructure-developers: there is strong upside in venues, digital-media infrastructure, analytics platforms and production-ecosystems.

Outlook