Capital event is fit for a king

Abu Dhabi is hosting one of the media world's most important summits next week and the line-up of attendees and the range of topics on the agenda show the emirate is starting to play in the big league.

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corp, was the keynote speaker at last year's inaugural Abu Dhabi Media Summit.

Content is king may be a cliche, but it is also true.

Demand for high-quality media output is a central theme of this year's Abu Dhabi Media Summit, which starts on Tuesday.

James Cameron, the film director, Yuri Milner, the Facebook investor, and James Murdoch, the News Corp executive, are among those expected in the UAE capital for the three-day event.

Topics include the rise of 3D in the entertainment industry, about which Mr Cameron is expected to discuss Avatar, the highest-grossing film of all time that he directed.

Other themes are likely to include the rise of digital media, the launch of an Arabic-language channel by Sky News and new forms of revenues for the music industry.

About 350 media industry executives are expected to attend the summit, hosted by the Abu Dhabi Media Company, which also owns and publishes The National.

The event is due to be attended by the top executives of companies such as Nokia, Thomson Reuters, Vivendi and Akamai Technologies, a company that focuses on internet content.

But while there is a global slant to the event, the summit plays a role in cementing Abu Dhabi's place in the world's media industry.

Avi Bhojani, the group chief executive of the marketing and communications agency BPG Group, says the calibre of the attendees at the summit suggests the regional media industry is growing up fast.

"Certainly it's giving this perception that the media industry in this region is coming of age … It gives the impression that the industry is being treated more seriously," he says.

The era of inflated salaries for some executives in Abu Dhabi's media industry is making way for a more sustainable talent base in the UAE capital, he says.

"In Abu Dhabi you tend to feel that the initial 'let's throw money and attract talent' is wearing off. And yet your decent talent is staying," he says.

Tim Smythe, the chief executive of the Dubai production house Filmworks, which facilitated the shoot of Mission: Impossible in the emirate, believes events such as the media summit boost Abu Dhabi's standing in the global industry. "It's definitely on the way to doing that. Abu Dhabi is getting a lot of attention. It takes time, but they're starting to attract some of the big media players," says Mr Smythe.

Media output is certainly on the rise in the emirate. Mr Smythe cites the production of Sea Shadow, the first local feature film by Imagenation Abu Dhabi, a film fund owned by ADMC.

And Abu Dhabi's media centre, twofour54, has grown significantly since the inaugural media summit last year, in which Rupert Murdoch gave the keynote address.

In the past 12 months, the number of media firms based at the centre has more than doubled, says Wayne Borg, the deputy chief executive and chief operating officer at twofour54. There are now 1,000 staff based at twofour54, compared with 300 a year ago.

"We've got over 100 [licensed companies] based at twofour54 - we had less than 40 at the time of the last summit," says Mr Borg.

The growth of twofour54 has been accompanied by an increase in the amount of content created at the centre. Twofour54's on-site studios have been used to produce more than "2,000 hours of content over the past year", Mr Borg says.

Digital media has also seen a boost. AppsArabia, the mobile phone applications fund backed by twofour54, released its first iPhone app in December.

Kalimat, a multiplayer word game that can be played in Arabic or English, was developed with the Dubai entrepreneur Fares Fayad, who pitched the idea to the fund.

Mr Borg says additional AppsArabia-funded products are in the pipeline. "We've got another nine in development right now, which will be launching in the coming six months."

Other milestones in Abu Dhabi's media industry since last year's summit include the launch of National Geographic Al Arabiya, published by ADMC, and the daily newspaper, Sport 360°, which is based at twofour54.

In March last year, Fox International Channels announced it had partnered twofour54 to open its regional headquarters in the Abu Dhabi media zone.

It also emerged last year that Sky News planned to launch an Arabic-language news channel based in Abu Dhabi by the end of next year.

And so this year's Abu Dhabi Media Summit, an event described by one commentator as "the Davos of media", is likely to encourage more content which, if not quite a "king", is at least deserving of royal status.