CEO Karim Daoud speaks to Teletimes
Interview: Khalid Athar
Teletimes – Please give us an overview of the services you are currently providing?
Karim Daoud – Intigral was established in 2009 as a joint venture between Saudi Telecom Company, All Asia Networks and Saudi Research and Marketing Group. The company was created to form the link between telecom operators, media content providers and end users. We decided to establish Intigral in response to the unprecedented emergence of digital content in the region. Intigral is focused on delivering digital media content services and solutions to operators and serves as a one-stop-shop for all their growing digital media needs on different platforms: Mobile, IPTV, and Web. We also provide Mobile Advertising solutions to our operators as we believe that this rapidly growing channel holds great opportunities to reach targeted audiences and generate positive responses.
In the today’s hyper competitive mobile industry, digital content has become a key differentiator for telecom operators. Providing unique digital entertainment Mobile content to the operators’ consumers is increasingly becoming a core service rather than an added value one. At Intigral, we offer our operator partners the entire spectrum of content and managed services, to help them maximize loyalty and revenue opportunities.
In addition to the locally relevant content aggregated from hundreds of local and global suppliers and service providers, we also design, develop and customize interactive and enriched content to meet the consumers’ growing expectations.
In the case of IPTV, we have a state-of-the-art broadcast, editing and post-production center in Dubai. We recently expanded our delivery from 50 to 180 channels, 30 of which are HD. We also provide managed TV services covering content acquisition and aggregation, user interface design and management, product management, marketing, and other services critical to the success of the operator’s TV offering. A key achievement of our IPTV division has been the launch last January of the first advanced interactive TV service in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Invision). This service delivers video content like live TV, Catch-Up TV and Video-on-Demand (VOD) to the TV screens of STC’s broadband customers. The VoD service features a vast collection of Hollywood, Bollywood, and Arabic blockbusters, movies and series as well as documentaries, religious titles and sports events. This feature also offers a large selection of movies to the KSA customers on their release dates in theaters in the Middle East.
As an illustration of Intigral’s approach to best support the telco’s agenda while leveraging the specificities unique to the market where it operates, Intigral was proud to be the first provider of on-demand Cinema at Home, featuring recent Arabic and Western releases at the same time they were playing in neighboring countries like the UAE and Bahrain.
The Web is a key marketing tool for telecom operators. Through the web, customers can now view and purchase telecom products and services, interact with customer care representatives, and ask questions. To help operators increase customer loyalty, reduce churn and ultimately increase profit, Intigral enables them to deliver their products and messages digitally by designing, developing, and managing their websites and turning them into customer retention tools and cross-selling platforms.
Finally, in terms of Mobile Advertising, Intigral has gathered a set of unique skills that helps its partners and clients in monetizing two key types of mobile inventory generated by telecom operators: “permission-based opt-in” inventory and “content-based” inventory. The company supports its clients in running carefully planned Opt-in programs to enroll end-users to the mobile advertising service, which is done by running segmentation exercises and lifestyle mapping to be able to provide advertisers with a clear breakdown of customers.
In order to enable telecom operators to run their mobile advertising service, Intigral works closely with key mobile advertising technology vendors which can help those operators in marketing different inventory across multiple platforms.
TT – Do you focus on providing any single service or catering to some specific section of the market?
KD – From a consumer perspective, we cater to all sorts of segments and we purposely build our offerings in line with our understanding of the consumer market which is based on thorough analysis of demographics and the segmentation of our operators’ end users. This applies to all our lines of business.
TT – Which countries is Intigral currently operating in?
KD – We currently cater to Saudi Telecom as our launch client from our offices in Dubai and Riyadh. Moreover, we have signed similar content providing contracts with Viva Bahrain, Viva Kuwait, Umnia in Jordan and on the verge of finalizing deals with several Telecom Operators in North Africa.
TT – Are you planning to expand your operations in the near future and do you have any plans set out to take place throughout the rest of 2011?
KD – Our TV value proposition brings all the premium TV and cinema content to the consumer in a simple, seamless user experience: one set top box, the largest selection of movies, pay TV and FTA channels relevant for the local market.
We have teamed up with the biggest Pay TV provider in the region to offer OSN channels to our operators’ consumers. We will be bringing to the end users the same OSN packages (Platinum Extra, Premier Plus, Movies Plus and Family Plus) available in the market with enhanced PVR capacities on all our linear channels. Our offering also includes Al-Jazeera Sports channel and Abu Dhabi Sports, all in Invision’s set top box.
TT – The nature of web services allows you to work from anywhere in the world. So do you provide to customers outside the countries you are actually based in?
KD – Our TV head-end is based in Dubai, but it provides full managed video services to Saudi Telecom in Riyadh. We have signed agreements with STC Wholesale enabling us to provide similar services to any telecom operator in the region, leveraging the great broadband infrastructure deployed by telecom operators.
Certainly, we have strategically chosen to be a B2B player without a B2C business, and this includes our web portal solutions. We manage consumer broadband portals on behalf of our operator partners. Utilizing our web and mobile platforms hosted in Saudi Arabia, we can serve operators across the region with their consumer broadband portal needs.
As a B2B focused company, our primary customer is the operator. And our aim is to fully support our operator partners in their efforts to bring the best and most relevant digital content to their customer base. As such, we are wholly focused on being an end-to-end solution provider to our operators, from content acquisition, to content and portal management. Taking on the entire role of managing an operator’s mobile content or web portal services allows the operator to focus on its core business, while outsourcing its content business to a trusted digital content expert. We work very closely with our operator partners to define their strategic needs in the content space and manage it on their behalf.
It is crucial to note that central to our ability to be the end-to-end partner of choice to our operators is out ability to leverage analytics on the customer database to enable the fine tuning of the offered content and promotional campaigns to each customer segment.
TT – Could you please talk about the business relationship between Intigral and STC?
KD – STC in Saudi Arabia is Intigral’s first and key operator partner. STC is also a founding shareholder of Intigral. Intigral is a separate entity under a different management.
TT – How has Intigral progressed over the years since its formation back in 2009?
KD – The year 2010 was the year in which the foundations were laid from a technology and platform perspective. The year 2011 is now fully focused on bringing the value added digital content to our key operator partner, STC, as well as our new operator partners in the region.
Having completed the installation and integration of our platforms and content management systems, we are now fully focused on bringing new products to the market. Expect a summer busy with announcements across all areas, from a revamped TV offering on Invision with great Ramadan content, to state of the art mobile portals covering Islamic, Women, and Music.
TT – How do you see the future of the organization?
KD – Our future is tied to our operator partners! We have a singular focus on growing the business through our operator partners, by delivering to their customer base the most attractive and locally relevant digital content across 3 screens.
And if we look at the state of the digital media industry in the region, we see lots of room for growth. As of today, only 1{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} of the global online content is in Arabic, while the Arab speaking population is up to 4{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} of total global population. Online advertising was a meager 1{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} of total advertising in the Arab region in 2009. However, given all the activity and buzz that is happening in this space, the prospects look very good. The recent Arab Media Outlook report forecasts the online advertising market to grow to 4{e1f18614b95d3cd6e4b3128e1cd15d99b042a60a5a19c19b7a8e07e7495efa10} of the total advertising market in the region by 2013. Mobile content spending is expected to hit $1.9Bn by 2013, from less than $670m in 2009. All of this will be driven by the flurry of activity from nimble start-ups across the region, as well as investments going into this space from the larger telecom and media players, all of whom are seeing a boost in demand from the young and internet savvy generation coming of age across the region.
