 | |
| Formerly | TwitVid Inc., Telly Inc. |
|---|---|
| Company type | Private[1] |
| Industry | Entertainment |
| Founded | 2009; 16 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 discovery 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 in Kuwait & 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 stakes by Cinemagics in Kuwait, one of the leading production companies in the region, in a move to revolutionize and change the behavior of audience in the GCC 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] According toBloomberg L.P., Mahatat Partnered with Kuwait TV, KTV.[25] In 2016, Mahatat expanded into television production, and produced its 1st Original Online series exclusively for Telly Plus Subscribers, The name of the series was “After the End”, which was executed by Cinemagic.[26]
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[27][28] and smartphones in emerging markets, an approach that has also been cited forNetflix.[11][29] 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.[27][28][30]
Mahatat generates revenue mainly from subscription based services as opposed to advertising to avoid losing customers to interruptions caused by the adverts, however, their business model is considered to be facing a competition by video piracy.[31]