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ahmoud
Bouneb,
veteran
broadcaster
with over 30
years
experience of
international journalism and media, is
making headlines again. He is the man
behind the first Pan-Arab
'edutainment' channel addressing an
audience between 7 and 15 years old,
and also the first pre-school Arabic
television for children between the age
of 3 and 6. As Executive General
Manager of
Al Jazeera Children’s
Channel
(JCC) and the
Baraem
pre-
school channel he has set his sights
high – not only regarding programme
quality and geographical reach but
also from a communication point of
view, making people understand what
these two channels are really about
How did JCC come about?
Everything you see here at JCC and
Baraem and in the Qatar Foundation
is inspired by Qatar's First Lady,
Sheikha Moza. Before JCC there were
very few productions for children,
mostly animation dubbed into
Arabic, and the kids used to be
passive viewers. So the vision of Her
Highness was to launch the first
'edutainment' channel, and she was
closely involved in the feasibility
study in the beginning. I am grateful
to her for bringing me from the news
and current affairs worlds to the
world of TV for children, and we are
all grateful to her for her dedication
and involvement in the past five
years to make this kind of TV
successful.
Wherever we go in the Arab world
to show our movies we win golden
awards. We brought on board the
best TV directors who never thought
that one day they would work for
children, and we said to them 'We
have a very low budget, we have
beautiful ideas, if you have better
ideas let us know, and we want you
to produce short movies, 35 minutes,
on kids, families, different issues.' It's
How do you produce/source your
content?
For JCC we are about 60% in-house
today. We have co-productions in
Malaysia, Canada, Korea, the UK,
France, the Arab world. We also buy
content on the world market - today
with Baraem about 2,000 hours per
year. We are very strict regarding
what we buy, we have a workflow
that takes care about technical and
editorial validation. For the pre-
school channel it was from day one
clear in our mind that it is about early
awareness, early learning, about
shapes, colours, language, behaviour,
relationship, interactivity with the
environment. For Baraem we have
the ambition to reach 30% in-house
production by the end of 2010. For
the pre-school you can find content
worldwide. On JCC it's difficult
because we consume more than 800
hours per year on this channel, so we
have to accept certain content that
doesn't fit with our strategy of
entertainment and education.
Does content from a different
cultural background work in the
Arabic world?
The content on the international
market is not made for children of the
western world, it is to make children
happy. On the international market
we can find challenging content, but
we have a problem with the fiction -
the dubbing. The dubbing kills the
content. When you take an American
or British series and use an Arabic
voice for a blonde, blue-eyed young
person it will not look credible. We
are doing all our dubbing into
classical Arabic. But we don't have a
problem of civilization compatibility,
if I may say so, because we have our
validation process that determines if
this is good for us or if this is not
good for us. And believe me, we do
not censor. We are the only Arab
children's channel, and the Secretary
General of the UN said the only
children's channel in the world,
which has a talk show. We have dealt
with the Jihad problems, with
IN CONVERSATION
|
THE CHANNEL
We
are the
only
children's
channel in
the world
which has
a talk
show
“
”
M
not about politics, it's not about
games, it's about the life of kids.
How long has the channel been
going?
We spent two years making
feasibility studies in the Arab world
and worldwide, and in September
2005 we launched Al Jazeera
Children's Channel (JCC).
But we knew that one day we'd
have to split the channel into two
because targeting kids from 3 to 15 is
difficult to achieve. So we reshuffled
JCC to target kids from 7 to 15 and
launched Baraem on 16 January
2009 - it is a unique channel targeting
pre-schoolers in the Arab world
free-to-air.
Where is your audience?
We broadcast on three satellites -
Arabsat and Nilesat cover the whole
Arab world but also parts of
Northern Europe and Asia, and then
Hotbird. In the UK we are on BSkyB
with JCC, Baraem hopefully
following next year. It is essential to
bring our offer not only to the
children of the Arab world but also to
all the Arab speaking kids
throughout the world. We want to
reach the Arab speaking community
in North America as soon as we can,
as soon as we have the content which
may feed one channel and bring a
credible offering to viewers on the
East coast of the US and in Canada.
Any audience figures?
We did a market penetration study
two years after our launch. We
brought three neutral people together
– an academic from the University in
Beirut, a former BBC guy and a
former ABC Australia guy – and we
explained to them our mandate, and
they then spent six months touring
the Arab world to see where we are.
What I can say is we are among the
top three covering the market - MBC3
which is the children's channel of the
MBC Group, Spacetoon which is a
channel broadcasting from Dubai,
and JCC.
THELIFEOFKIDS
THE CHANNEL
|
ISSUE 2 2009
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