Al Arabiya joins Livestation

The 24-hour news channel Al Arabiya from Dubai has joined Livestation, a destination portal for live TV broadcasting over broadband.

Al Arabiya offers a mix of breaking news, current, documentaries and sports updates. The channel has joined Livestation’s existing line-up of Arabic news channels which already included services offered by Al Jazeera, BBC, France 24, Russia Today (Rusya Al Yaum) and Euronews.

According to Matteo Berlucchi, the CEO of Livestation, the addition of Al Arabiya as an official Livestation partner channel is part of an ongoing strategy to widen the choice of perspectives offered on the player. He said he was delighted to have reached agreement with the channel.

“We have found, when we analyse the viewing patterns on the Livestation player, that the broadband audience is both loyal and fickle. They are loyal to their favoured news provider, returning to the channel several times a day and, on average, spending half an hour with their preferred news offering each visit. However, when a big story breaks, they tend to exercise the choice Livestation offers by clicking through to adjacent channels on the player”, according to Berlucchi.

“Viewers are also using the live, real-time chat associated with each channel as they channel hop and channel chat at the same time. It is a new and exciting phenomenon and the detailed user statistics are helping us map viewer behaviour in ways that have previously not been available to broadcasters. Al Arabiya, as do all our partner channels, will now benefit from this audience information enabling them to target and develop their service in response to actual viewer behaviour patterns,” he said.