While the global economic crisis is causing companies worldwide to tear up business plans and scale back growth, in the Middle East the relative declines in the media sector have been less severe and certainly the potential for growth is still very apparent.

A big factor in the growing media consumption in the Arab world is that young people – who are big consumers of media – make up a large proportion of the region's population. More than half of the people in Yemen, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and Egypt are estimated to be less than 25 years old, according to the Arab Media Outlook 2008-2012 produced by the UK consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers. Meanwhile, traditional media here is also better-placed to weather the current slump in ad spend because of strong newspaper-reading traditions in many countries and also because many of the countries in the region – with some notable exceptions like Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – have less than 10% of their homes connected to broadband.

Although growth forecasts in the region have been scaled back because of the global economic downturn, this area of the world is still set to see growing media consumption over the next five to 10 years, driven by demographics, new technologies and a gradual easing of some of the traditional restrictions on media.

Landmarks of media content expansion are already being set such as the success of the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera news channel in becoming a global brand and the first public screening of a movie for more than 30 years in Saudi Arabia last December.

What is becoming clear is that producing content to satisfy a growing appetite for media – and Arab media in particular – holds big potential.

Building up local media businesses and infrastructure is also seen as a way to diversify economies that have traditionally been resource-dependent. Dubai, one of the seven Emirates that make up the UAE, began offering studios and office space to international media companies nearly 10 years ago as part of a bigger move to diversify its economic base. Dubai Media City has attracted many large foreign companies, from Viacom's MTV and Nickelodeon to Time Warner's CNN, to set up local channels and bureaux in Dubai.

More recently, the biggest and the richest of the Emirate countries, Abu Dhabi, has taken the next step and decided that attracting the expertise needed to create Arab media is a good way to both diversify its economy and help take local culture and traditions into the mass communications age.

Potential growth

"The region wants to be more than just buildings and a place for people to be," says Tony Orsten, chief executive officer of twofour54, a new venture funded by the Abu Dhabi government that is building a "creative hub" for media training and production. (The name twofour54 refers to the map coordinates of Abu Dhabi.)

"The crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has a cultural vision that includes not just building TV studios, which is part of what we are doing here at twofour54," says Orsten. Saadiyat Island, off the coast of Abu Dhabi is set to become the cultural centre of the Emirate, featuring the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Sheikh Zayed National museum and the Performing Arts Centre. "The idea is if you bring the best of the world's culture, then everything else just bubbles up to that same level," says Orsten.

Twofour54 is part of a larger plan to diversify Abu Dhabi's economy away from oil by 2030, but it is also about setting a standard and an example of how media should be developed to make it more professional and also more exportable. "It is about making the Middle East a cultural force on the world stage," says Orsten, a former executive at Paramount Pictures who came to Abu Dhabi to set up and run twofour54 in December 2007.

By 2014, a rumoured $3bn will have been spent by twofour54 on building studios, offices and training facilities as well as providing incubation funds for local media professionals and foreign media companies wanting to create locally-targeted content. "Content for TV in this part of the world is made on very low budgets and the focus tends to be for programming around Ramadan only," says Orsten. "We want to help enrich the whole process so that there are two to three dozen production companies working here in the next two to three years."

The twofour54 project has attracted the attention of western media giants from the BBC to HarperCollins and CNN but backing has also come from of one of the biggest Arab media companies, Rotana Studios, the film and TV production company owned by Saudi billionaire and media enthusiast Prince Waleed bin Talal. It was Prince Waleed who got the necessary local permissions to screen Rotana's film, Manahi, in Saudi Arabia late last year. The screenings lifted a ban on cinemas by ultraconservative Wahhabi clerics set in the 1970s.

Whereas Saudi Arabia is one of the most traditional societies in the Middle East, the UAE is one of the most open. Dr Amina al-Rustamani, a woman, is the executive director for media at Tecom Investments, which owns Dubai Media City. And twofour54 is keen to offer training to both men and woman from the region. "The best thing about the UAE is they back women," says Nashwa Al Ruwaini, a Egyptian producer who works across the Middle East. "If you are a woman and you want to do something, the Emirates is the place to be."

Rotana has signed a partnership deal with twofour54 that will see it produce programming in Abu Dhabi. "There is no country without culture and there is no modern country without content," says Frederic Sichler, president of Rotana Studios who believes that professionalising Arabic content production is key to unlocking the region's creative force. "We thought that twinning the idea of training and funding was a good approach, so we became part of twofour54." Sichler joined Rotana 15 months ago from Paris where he ran Vivendi's film production unit, StudioCanal.

Rotana will develop and co-produce Arabic TV programming with twofour54, with a focus on TV movie production, which shows great potential, says Sichler.

Natural understanding

Sichler is also keen to see local women become more involved in media. "Women have a natural understanding of what people want to see. They already have key positions in the media world here. Prince Waleed himself is particularly keen on helping women progress to the highest levels possible. At Rotana, the heads of Rotana Cinema Channel, human resources and corporate marketing are all women."

When asked about the restrictions on media in some parts of the Middle East Sichler says: "I think that real talent has always found a way to express itself and all of the history of art has proved that. I am here not to say what I want but to help the local people do what they want to do and to do it professionally and successfully. I am on a mission to help people but not to tell them how to express themselves."