Presenting VR to a Room Full of Arab Journalists:
Discussing the Challenges of Adopting the Technology
“I really loved learning about 360 video from your talk,” a young man said following my keynote on 360 storytelling during the Al Jazeera Digital Media Forum in Istanbul, Turkey.
“But, can I ask, have you considered how internet quality is low in the Middle East, which can be a problem in watching 360 video? What are you doing as a solution?” he continued.
The theme of the AJDMF, “Crossing to the Future” aims to create a conversation among young Arab journalists about the future of media and the latest global trends in communication technology and social fronts. From news app startups like Astrolabe, an Arab language app that customizes news for the user, to international news channels like TRT World, the conference was a diverse landscape of news and journalism in the Arab world sharing their learnings and future goals.
Before my presentation detailing an introduction to 360º/VR storytelling, I asked who knew what 360 video was. Nearly everyone raised their hands. Less than a quarter raised their hands when asked if they had watched 360 video before. I could count on one hand who had actually made a 360 video before — one of whom is my colleague.
Studies show that most of the revenue generated by the VR industry is coming from the Americas — with highest market growth expected in the Asia-Pacific, forecasted to grow 69% by 2023, with some of the least developed regions for the industry being in the Middle East. In an extensive study analyzing the AR and VR industry through interviews with key experts, only 5% of the interviewees were from the Middle East and Africa, as opposed to 77% from North America and Europe.
Moreover, while a lot of content by 360 filmmakers in the journalism space involves documenting issues in the Middle East and Africa, little content has been made by Arab or African filmmakers themselves.
One of our key initiatives at Contrast is based precisely on seeing this gap in the industry — and investing in supporting and building an ecosystem of diverse and local storytellers within this region. Through My People, Our Stories and various other programs, we’ve trained and equipped aspiring filmmakers with VR technology in the Global South from Asia to Africa to the Middle East and South America.
In my presentation, I made the case that there are ways to make this technology more accessible and consumable — and our training initiatives and experiments publishing 360 video on Al Jazeera Arabic for an Arab speaking audience show that people are watching the content.
The young man who asked if Al Jazeera Contrast understood the challenges of internet connectivity — and by extension, the larger question of distributing digital content in the Middle East, made me pause. Yes, we had considered the barriers of entry to 360 video in the Middle East, particularly in reference to mobile and internet penetration. Arabic digital content only accounts for 0.162% of the total digital content online, and the number of websites hosted in the MENA region amounts to just 0.198% of the global total. However, connectivity is on the rise, shown by the growing social media usage in the region, now with 42 million young Arab Facebook users and 2.17 million Twitter users.
What’s clear is that there are challenges in adopting such a new tech heavy medium into a region that is largely still developing. However, our approach has been grass roots, dismantling technology barriers by providing free cameras and trainings to aspiring filmmakers in the region, organizing pop-up VR screenings like the one we held in the public space underneath Falomo bridge in Lagos, Nigeria, and creating content that is relevant to viewers within this region.
This young man, Mohammed, is a video producer at a Libyan channel. He shared a few examples of their creative solutions in fighting low internet connectivity for their content, particularly for their target audience in Libya, a country with traditionally low internet penetration (reaching only 20.27% of Libyans in 2016). Some of the ways they combat this is to export the video in lower resolution before uploading to Facebook, after which he saw a sharp rise in viewership of their videos. They also take all of the important information in the video, and include it in the social copy, so that those who couldn’t watch the video could still learn from the information.
“It’s not impossible. But these are important things to think about for us,” he said. As he walked away, a few other members from the audience showed me the 360 video projects that they had worked on — many more participants than that initial ‘handful’ that raised their hands during the presentation. The seeds of the 360 medium are there, but first a community needs to be built and fostered — which is at the core of Al Jazeera Contrast’s work.
If you are a reader who is working in a growing industry that faces a lot of challenges, please comment below with how you are working to overcome them.
