Arabic edition of Sky News to air from Abu Dhabi



Are we witnessing the rising of a potential competitor to AL Arabiya & AL Jazeera News Channels. Probably.

AL Arabiya/Arabian Business- British Sky Broadcasting Group formed a joint venture with Abu Dhabi Media Investment Corp to start an Arabic-language news service, its first foreign- language channel.

The 24-hour channel will run under the Sky News brand from Abu Dhabi and start broadcasting in 2012 to the Middle East and northern Africa, BSkyB said on Monday in a statement. Abu Dhabi Media is an investment company ran by HH Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, owner of English soccer club Manchester City.

“The Middle East and North Africa is a highly attractive region for media investment and Abu Dhabi is an excellent location from which to enter this exciting marketplace,” BSkyB chairman James Murdoch said in the statement.

BSkyB already broadcasts Sky News in English in the Middle East. The company, which rejected a 7.8 billion-pound ($12.2bn) offer from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for the 61 percent of the broadcaster that News Corp doesn’t already own, is expanding the brand to gain viewers outside the UK.

The new 24-hour Arabic channel will follow the model of Sky News, which gained international fame for its independence and objectivity as well as its wide coverage of the latest news from different parts of the world, said ADMIC Chairman Dr. Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber.

According to Jaber, the channel will offer full coverage of regional and international news and will employ innovative techniques that will focus on the use of multimedia.

The news offered by the channel will also be available online and a mobile service will be launched to send news updates to subscribed users.

Jaber added that the channel, website, and mobile service will be supervised by more than 180 multimedia journalists from different parts of the world and who will be supported by an expert technical and administrative team.

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