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Arabic Video on the web: The bad, good & ugly

January 4th, 2012

With being an internet user for the past 15 years of my life. If not more, I always had a problem with Arabic videos. When it comes to video clips, besides the SMS bars and the icons that occupy 33% of the screen, the video quality was never up to standards, as a video ripper… I used to suffer from it, replacing real audio with an mp3 version of the song, editing the screen and wishing all Arabic videoclips were done in 16:9 or widescreen in general so I could crop the freaking spam and enjoy the video. That was fine!

Now, watching Arabic shows was great except that most of the Syrian drama series or dubbed cartoons were aired in a bad time for me, working from 9 am to 6 pm doesn’t let you enjoy, maybe because Arab TV stations are stupid enough to cater for housewives only, I’m not sure to be honest.

Finding videos the last few years wasn’t hard, the bad part was: The spam on the nickname of the rippers/channel owner’s name on the video on YouTube because Arab users steal and re-post, The low quality render of Audio, bad cutting and the splits, an episode of Bab Al-hara would be 5 parts because a user in only allowed to upload 10 min videos or has to be a producer or a TV station representative to have a longer length video service allowed.

3 months ago, I was introduced to Istikana and I can say… I am finally reliefed. Istikana is similar to Hulu and Vevo, a website that offers full length video content in Arabic that is one hundred percent legal, providing content that I grew up watching, like Al-Husun and many other dubbed cartoons with also on-demand videos in a variety of genres from Cartoons and Theatre, to Comedy and Religion, The content has primarily come from Jordan, but from Egypt, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia is on its way. With 3 to 4 new titles released on a weekly basis, you can constantly come back to Istikana and get your fix of Arabic videos. Istikana can also be accessed on the go from your iOS or Android devices.

I have hope now, and can’t wait for more projects to come-up this way, Please Rotana do not get in this! – Visit Istikana.