 | |
| Formerly | TwitVid Inc., Telly Inc. |
|---|---|
| Company type | Private[1] |
| Industry | Entertainment |
| Founded | 2009; 17 years ago (2009)[2] |
| Headquarters | Kuwait |
Areas served | Middle East and North Africa |
Key people | |
| Brands | Telly Plus (2012)[5] |
| Services | Video streaming,Video on demand |
| Website | www |
Mahatat (formerlyTelly, Inc. andTwitvid Inc.) is aKuwait-based company that operates avideo on demand platform and offers video streaming services in the Middle East and North Africa.[6][2][7][8][5][9][10][11][12] The platform also features Bollywood films and locally produced content, TV shows and exclusive Original contents[13] as well as Kuwaiti Short Films on their website.[14][15][16]
Mahatat Inc, formerly Telly, Inc and Twitvid Inc, was founded in 2009 in the United States.[2][17] The company primarily serves Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, and Yemen with local presence and offices inKuwait & Dubai.[2][12][18]
After its launch in 2012, Mahatat made social recommendations for videos that a visitor's social contacts may have been watching. Mahatat claims to have had about 115 million views in February and has raised a cumulative of $20 million from different investors such as DFJ, Lumia Capital and Azure Capital with a majority stake by Cinemagics in Kuwait, one of the leading production companies in the region.[5] With the knowledge that no one had yet cracked the video-on-demand market in the Middle East, Mahatat and Icflix became the main competitors when they entered a fragmented market affected by piracy and little investment yet with 14.5 million hours of videos are watched per day.[5] Mahatat soon signed deals withSony Pictures Television,Samsung mobile andMiramax as well as independent content owners for more than 1,000 television shows and films.[5][17][19][20]
In 2013, the company acquired Sha-Sha (شاشا), which was dubbed as theNetflix of the Middle East,[21] to serve video streaming to the Arab world.[22] Later, Mahatat teamed up with Telfaz 11, Saudi Arabia's primary Internet television network, to cater this customer base for a first window before the show hits YouTube.[17][23]
In June 2015, co-produced with CinemagicsA Song in her eyes, starred byHaya Abdul Salam & Fouwad Ali. This is the first move towards original production and programming for Mahatat.[24]
The company has signed up with major studios likeSony Pictures for series likeBreaking Bad and films likeThe Social Network andThere Will Be Blood.[5] Mahatat has been reported to leverage the trend of smart TVs,[25][26] and smartphones in emerging markets, an approach that has also been cited forNetflix.[11][27] Mahatat has hence been mainly serving these two types of customers that prefer to stream videos online. This service has specifically been cited to be enabled inPanasonic Smart TVs as a pre-loaded service to market to Middle East with Hollywood and Arabic movies and TV shows.[25][26][28]