Ziad Kebbi built Arab TV on licensed formats — now MForMedia bets he can make Dubai own its IP

The Gulf’s television economy was assembled, brick by brick, out of other people’s ideas — ‘Deal or No Deal’ in Arabic, ‘The Voice’ in Arabic, ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ in Arabic. Few executives laid more of that scaffolding than Ziad Kebbi, who launched Endemol’s Middle East arm, ran Sony Pictures Television Arabia and later Talpa Middle East, shepherding nine seasons of the regional juggernaut ‘The Voice Arabia.’ Which lends a neat irony to his new job: the man who built a career importing Western formats has been hired to stop importing them.

Kebbi steps in as Managing Director of MForMedia, the Dubai producer, with a mandate to re-engineer it into a studio that creates and owns its intellectual property across scripted and unscripted work, with digital output and AI production as the other load-bearing pillars. “The best stories from this region have not been told yet,” he said — a line that doubles as a thesis and a quiet rebuke of a business built on adapting ideas invented elsewhere.

The move reads as a bet that the region has aged out of its format-localization phase. For two decades the commercial logic was reassuringly safe: license a proven franchise, swap the host, sell the ad inventory. Owning IP is riskier and slower, but it is the only version of the business that accrues a catalogue — the asset base that lets a producer face a global streamer as something other than a hired hand.

MForMedia knows the format game intimately. Launched a decade ago by Khalil Homeissy and Ralph Matar, who stay on to steer group strategy, it has produced regional versions of ‘Carpool Karaoke,’ ‘The X Factor’ and ‘Takeshi’s Castle.’ Kebbi frames the pivot as continuity rather than rupture — “building on this foundation to create, source and produce content … shaped by the tools and thinking of what is coming,” a nod to the AI layer he wants running underneath the whole operation.

The timing tracks a wider Gulf push, as Saudi and Emirati money chases owned content and production infrastructure over one-off licensing deals. Homeissy is blunt about the stakes: the companies that lead, he argues, are “the ones that combine deep production craft with real creative networks.” For the executive who taught the Arab world to reproduce ‘The Voice’ and ‘Millionaire,’ the assignment now is the inverse — to build something other markets will one day pay to copy.

Tags: Dubai, executive move, IP ownership, MForMedia, Ziad Kebbi