The BBC's new channel is the new kid on the block for the Middle East. The new Arabic language channel will begin broadcasting March 11 for 12 hours a day then move to a 23/7 schedule by the summer. BBC Arabic will be in competition with other media networks such as Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera, which provide news 24 hours a day to the Arab world. According to the Allied Media Corporation web site, an independent marketing organization, the total viewership of Al-Arabiya has 23 million viewers in the Arab World. Whereas Al-Jazeera has roughly 53 million viewers in the Arab world. According to the BBC, over 13 million people listen to BBC Arabic every week while its website bbcarabic.com receives over 21 million page views and has over one million unique users each month. A decade earlier the BBC attempted to launch a similar version of BBC Arabic in partnership with Bahrain-based Orbit. The deal fell through and many investors and journalists moved to Al-Jazeera based in Qatar. Viewers in the Kingdom have their own favorite channels but they are not entirely convinced that BBC Arabic will be much different from its established counterparts. “I watch several news channels but I prefer to watch Al-Arabiya,” said Mahmoud Abo Al-Huoda, an educational supervisor in the Kingdom. “Certainly I'll watch the BBC Arabic because whenever something big happens I switch from channel to channel (to get all the details).” Rasha Al-Zahrani, an administrator in Tecnimont Arabia Ltd Company, said she does not like many of the channels because of unfair bias. “Al-Jazeera news is not credible and Al-Ekhbariyah channel does not back up the reports with filmed pictures and it's all local. On the other hand, Al-Arabiya's news is neutral, credible, periodic, both local and international, you know that you can trust anything they broadcast. The BBC is also credible news but it wasn't local enough and sometimes its news is not backed up (properly),” Al-Zahrani said. BBC Arabic will be funded by British taxpayers with a bill of £25 million and part of a larger set of alternative language channels for the Middle East. Later this year BBC Persian is set to begin, geared towards viewers in Iran. The initial plans for BBC Arabic were announced in late 2005, resulting in the closure of 10 stations service in Eastern Europe in order to finance the new channel. Since then the British government has agreed to boost World Service funding to £252 million annually. The BBC's latest endeavor will have its primary centers in Cairo and London and will draw from the BBC's 250 correspondents working from 72 news desks from around the world to provide its daily coverage. The main reason behind opening an Arabic channel is that Arabic viewers follow the BBC channel and website in higher demand for their 24 news cover and trust what they provide from their credible sources. BBC World Service Director Nigel Chapman said people in the Middle East will welcome another news channel because of the reliability of the BBC in the rest of the world. “We are encouraged that independent research consistently shows an appetite for a BBC Arabic television channel. The main reason people give is quite simple – it is because they believe the BBC will provide an independent news service they could trust,” Chapman said. Their service is free and provided by the Arabsat, Eutelsat, and Nilesat satellite, to the region. __
