Media companies in the Arab world don’t usually have much more than a standard website/portal with which they mark their presence and just showcase their programme alongside a bit of content here and there; but in one of the Arab world’s first moves of its kind, the Saudi media giant MBC Group, which is based in Dubai Media City, has gone on and launched a major online service called ‘Movies In Motion‘ in association with the Dubai International Film Festival.
The service is available in English and Arabic and is really well built and pretty rich in features, mainly revolving around social-networking and video-sharing.
Users get to put together their network of friends; join or create groups around which communities can be built; they can list their favorite Movies, Actors and Directors; post articles, gossip, news, …etc; have access to reviews of movies playing on the MBC channels and the possibility to comment on them.
Another important part of the service is the video sharing one, where users get to upload and rate their own short movies, that could earn them prizes like the Nokia N95 and get their short movies played on MBC2; another possibility is to play around with current MBC on air promotions creating their own mashups.
Obviously a lot of work and planning went into this project; it’s pretty well designed and really organized, the features are all consistent and well implemented, overall a very good effort from the MBC Group.
Hopefully this will start a trend of media companies making more advances in the online world, introducing more new services and focusing on more innovation.
# MBC2 Movies In Motion