Mike Sneesby Appointed CEO of Top Middle East Broadcaster MBC Group as Sam Barnett Steps Down
Barnett, who led MBC for more than 20 years in two separate stints has been instrumental to MBC becoming a major Middle East player in both the linear and streaming spheres. Barnett will now join PPF Group's Central European Media Enterprises as its Prague-based CEO.
More from Variety
Mike Sneesby Resigns as CEO of Australia's Nine Entertainment
Hend Sabri on Arabic Adaptation of 'The Good Wife': 'It's Crucial to Have Such a Nuanced Character in This Part of the World'
'Top Chef Middle East' Moves to Saudi Arabia's Neom Hub for New Season
Sneesby left Nine Entertainment, which spans TV, streaming and newspapers, in September 2024 following months of turmoil including the passing of a staff no confidence motion against him and the group's board of directors.
Sneesby was previously co-founder of Australian streamer Stan and its CEO from 2015.
Sneesby's appointment to lead MBC Group comes as the Saudi-owned group is on a growth trajectory after floating a 10% stake on the Riyadh stock exchange at the end of 2023 and gaining increasing traction on its streaming side.
The Saudi government currently owns a 60% stake in MBC while the rest is held by MBC Group chairman Waleed bin Ibrahim Al-Ibrahim who founded the pan-Arab satcaster that operates leading premium streamer Shahid VIP.
Streaming is booming across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where the OTT subscription video market enjoyed robust 13% growth in 2023, led by local players Shahid and StarzPlay, according to media analyst Omdia. It expects streaming revenues to reach $1.2 billion in 2024.According to Omdia, Shahid — which is part of Saudi-owned linear TV operator and streamer MBC Group — leads the MENA streaming market with a 22% share thanks to its 3.6 million subscribers at the end of 2023.
Best of Variety
New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week
What's Coming to Disney+ in April 2025
The Best Celebrity Memoirs to Read This Year: From Chelsea Handler to Anthony Hopkins
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
3 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Woman caught in Coldplay ‘Kiss Cam' embrace resigns from tech company
A senior human resources executive at a New York-based tech firm has stepped down after a moment of unintentional viral fame at a Coldplay concert exposed her in a compromising embrace with the company's CEO. Kristin Cabot, formerly chief people officer at Astronomer, resigned this week following the abrupt departure of CEO Andy Byron, who had quit after initially being placed on leave. The resignations come in the wake of a July 16 Coldplay concert at Gillette Stadium in the Boston suburb of Foxborough, where the pair were unexpectedly caught on the venue's kiss cam. 'Kristin Cabot is no longer with Astronomer, she has resigned,' company spokesperson Taylor Jones confirmed in a brief statement. The footage, now widely shared online, shows Byron and Cabot smiling and leaning into one another before reacting in panic upon seeing themselves on the Jumbotron. Cabot recoils, hands to her face, while Byron ducks out of the frame. 'Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy,' Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, narrating the moment, quipped. Astronomer soon confirmed their identities and launched an internal investigation. Their profiles were quietly removed from the company website, along with a news release announcing Cabot's hiring. While the episode marked a corporate scandal for Astronomer, it had an unexpected upside for Coldplay; the band's streaming numbers jumped by 25% in the days following the incident, according to Luminate. 'While I would never have wished for it to happen like this,' interim CEO Pete DeJoy reflected in a LinkedIn post, 'Astronomer is now a household name.'
Business Insider
5 hours ago
- Business Insider
Critical Role's Matt Mercer is giving up control of a core pillar of the crew's booming business
Critical Role's chief creative officer and longtime game master, Matthew Mercer, is making a big change at the team's nerdworld business. When the team's fourth campaign kicks off on October 2, it won't be Mercer sitting behind the game master's screen. Instead, helming the campaign — a long-term staple of Critical Role's streaming business — will be Brennan Lee Mulligan of " Dimension 20" fame. The two men have forged a formidable alliance, guest-starring on each other's shows while cornering a sizable chunk of the tabletop touring business. The eight-member CR crew has filled arenas from Wembley in London to megashow venues in Australia, while "Dimension 20" sold out Madison Square Garden for their January gig. "We've been enormous fans of Brennan's for many years now, and when it came to giving both Matthew Mercer and the world of Exandria a bit of a breather, Brennan felt like the perfect storyteller to take our community somewhere entirely new," Critical Role CEO Travis Willingham said in a press release. The show's fourth campaign will air on CR's streaming platform, Beacon, and its YouTube and Twitch channels. The campaign will also be set in a new world, not Mercer's world of Exandria, in which the first three campaigns occurred. "What a gift, a privilege, and an honor to be invited behind the screen of Critical Role for this next epic adventure," Mulligan said in the press release. "Every collaboration we have had together has brought nothing but sheer joy, and Campaign 4 will be no exception." CR has not announced if its fourth campaign will still use "Dungeons & Dragons," the Wizards of the Coast-owned system that the crew first started playing on stream. The CR team is now promoting "Daggerheart," its answer to the "D&D" juggernaut. Its main cast has rolled out content on-stream to promote the now sold-out game. "We're not just turning a page — we're starting a whole new book," Marisha Ray, CR cofounder and the team's creative director, said in the press release. Ray also teased new content in a June interview with Business Insider backstage at the crew's Melbourne show. There'll be more "fun, out-of-the-box" content airing on Beacon for CR subscribers, she said. "We have a lot of ideas for shows and stuff that we want to do. It's really just making sure that not just the cast, but also the production team, isn't overextending itself too much," Ray told BI. "And we really want to do more shorter-run series as well with 'Daggerheart,'" she added. "I think it lends itself very well to short-run series as well as genre-bending, and doing more things that we can experiment with." CR has not said if all the cofounders will participate in the crew's fourth campaign, which may mark a significant departure from 10 years of streaming together. Still, the CR cofounders are being kept busy with their two Amazon-backed animated series. "The Mighty Nein" drops on November 19 on Prime Video. Meanwhile, "The Legend of Vox Machina," which raised more than $11 million in its initial Kickstarter funding run, has been renewed for a fifth and final season. The fourth season of "Vox Machina" is slated for 2026.
CNBC
5 hours ago
- CNBC
Delta Air assures US lawmakers it will not personalize fares using AI
Delta Air Lines said on Friday it will not use artificial intelligence to set personalized ticket prices for passengers after facing sharp criticism from U.S. lawmakers and broad public concern. Last week, Democratic Senators Ruben Gallego, Mark Warner and Richard Blumenthal said they believed the Atlanta-based airline would use AI to set individual prices, which would "likely mean fare price increases up to each individual consumer's personal 'pain point.'" Delta said it has not used AI to set personalized prices but previously said it plans to deploy AI-based revenue management technology across 20% of its domestic network by the end of 2025 in partnership with Fetcherr, an AI pricing company. "There is no fare product Delta has ever used, is testing or plans to use that targets customers with individualized prices based on personal data," Delta told the senators in a letter on Friday, seen by Reuters. "Our ticket pricing never takes into account personal data." Senators praised Delta's commitment not to use AI for personal pricing but expressed many questions and want more details about what data Delta is collecting to set prices. "Delta is telling their investors one thing, and then turning around and telling the public another," Gallego said. "If Delta is in fact using aggregated instead of individualized data, that is welcome news." Delta declined comment on Gallego's statement. The senators cited a comment in December by Delta President Glen Hauenstein that the carrier's AI price-setting technology is capable of setting fares based on a prediction of "the amount people are willing to pay for the premium products related to the base fares." Last week, American Airlines CEO Robert Isom said using AI to set ticket prices could hurt consumer trust. "This is not about bait and switch. This is not about tricking," Isom said on an earnings call, adding "talk about using AI in that way, I don't think it's appropriate. And certainly from American, it's not something we will do." Democratic lawmakers Greg Casar and Rashida Tlaib last week introduced legislation to bar companies from using AI to set prices or wages based on Americans' personal data and would specifically ban airlines raising individual prices after seeing a search for a family obituary. They cited a Federal Trade Commission staff report in January that found "retailers frequently use people's personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services -- from a person's location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage." The FTC cited a hypothetical example of a consumer profiled as a new parent who could intentionally be shown higher-priced baby thermometers and collect behavioral details to forecast a customer's state of mind. Delta said airlines have used dynamic pricing for more than three decades, in which pricing fluctuates based on a variety of factors like overall customer demand, fuel prices and competition, but not a specific consumer's personal information. "Given the tens of millions of fares and hundreds of thousands of routes for sale at any given time, the use of new technology like AI promises to streamline the process by which we analyze existing data and the speed and scale at which we can respond to changing market dynamics," Delta's letter said.
