The first Arabic pre-school TV station has been launched by the Al Jazeera Children’s Channel (JCC).
The channel called Baraem (meaning ‘buds’) caters for children aged 3-6 years old and will be broadcast across the pan-Arab region and in Europe.
“There was not only a demand for a channel of this kind, there was an urgent need,” said Mahmoud Bouneb, executive general manager of JCC, speaking exclusively to digitalproductionme.com.
“There are around 500 free to air channels in this region and there was not one Arabic language pre-school channel until now.”
Baraem will broadcast for 17 hours a day with around seven hours of fresh content daily. Programming has been acquired from Europe, North America, Australia and from within the pan-Arab region.
The station is also looking to produce a high volume of material itself.
“Initially 15-20 percent of the content will consist of in-house productions or commissioned content and we will look to increase this figure to 30-40 percent by the second year,” claimed Bouneb.
The JCC was launched in 2005 with a target audience of 3-15 year olds, which Bouneb admits was always going to be a challenging market.
“We knew from that time that this mission was nearly impossible because you cannot cover that entire age range with one slate of content. We knew that one day or another we would have to split JCC to create the pre-school channel,” said Bouneb.
Baraem will be funded by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development, which owns 90 percent of the JCC with the Al Jazeera Network owning the remaining 10 percent.
“There are many commercial channels operating but it is our aim to act as a public service channel for Arab children. The commercial market is so limited and so modest that we are not open to commercial interests.
"However we believe for this kind of channel it is better to remain public funded, in the same way that our schools and kindergartens are public funded,” added Bouneb.
Site Map
FEATURED COMMENT
Please click here to comment on this article