NADAV PALTI Dori Media Group

United World
MAPAL's strategy of creating and expanding upon your synergies really ties your 5 main fields of focus and allows each of them to find support from one another. How critical has this synergistic approach been for the success of MAPAL?

Mr. Nadav Palti

Let us start with a few words about Mapal Communications. It is a communications company established in 1999 by Tamar Moses and myself. In June of 2000, Africa-Israel bought 20% of Mapal. Mapal has a number of segments. The first is media through Dorimedia Group. The second is Cellular through Europhone, which is a cellular content company. They distribute content from major studios such as Dreamworks Studios as well as our own. Our central focus is Europe. The third is internet. The first company we worked with on the internet is Cupid which was bought by J-date. We operated in Israel and in the USA both in the Jewish and gentile segment.

Today we have a site called Travelist (www.travelist.co.il) which is a site geared for tourism. It is a very smart search engine that finds the best flight for the best price, as well as hotels and car rentals. We are the only travel search engine that is objective because we are not an agent rather we link people directly to the supplier. We have a satisfaction factor where you rate the supplier which gives the other consumers an incentive to use our website. In addition, our travel website also provides benefits, for example special tours in India or Turkey. These are not justified by price but rather by the quality of the tours and their exclusivity. Today we are opening an English version for people who are coming to Israel and we are looking to expand outside of Israel.

Our next segment is advertising where we focus on CTV, a large electronic billboard (outdoor) used for advertising. We also have an indoor division whose products are implemented in banks, for example where they help to disclose information to the customer without brochures. Another use is to centrally communicate with many offices. With this technology you can control millions of screens from one computer, whereby at any given time, one can see different content on each screen. We want to take this technology out of Israel.

Another company of ours, the LDI Groupfocuses on branding and retail in terms of rights. Here in Israel we represent companies like Warner Brothers and Marvel but only for merchandising. We leverage these brands and place them on various products through our subsidiary Upex Brands and DTR. We sell for example soup or napkins that are branded towards children through comic book characters. We use characters like Spiderman and Looney Tunes that attract children and make a quality statement since the Warner Brothers name signals quality.

Dorimedia Group is a more international company, an international media company dealing with TV, internet and new media but focuses on Telenovelas. We work through five departments. The first is production. We produce much in Argentina and in Israel. In Argentina we own three studios and have produced six shows this year. We produce most of of the Israeli Telenovelas through our subsidiaries Dori Media Darset and Dori Media Paran We have a library of 4.5 thousand hours that we produced in the last five to six years. The second department is distribution. We sell to more than fifty countries around the world and all in all we sell to over 400 channels. The base of operations is Israel and in Switzerland, we have our International headquarters. We distribute through our companies and by participating in conventions. We attend conventions in Las Vegas, L.A., Cannes, and Singapore. One week we are selling in L.A.and the next week we are buying. Next month we are going to Hungary, South Korea, and Seoul.

We are also the biggest Telenovela buyers in the world, through our two channels in Israel. We are ranked number four in terms of rating where we are a premium channel and we are superseded only by the free channels. We have two channels in Indonesia which is number one in rating there. This year we are going to launch in Latin America with a twenty-four hour day telenovela channel and then develop in Germany and Eastern Europe. The bottom line of the strategy is to have a worldwide channel of telenovelas, and we want it to be the MTV of telenovelas. The channel is tailored made to its market, in terms of language, culture and holidays.

The fourth department is ancillary business, everything related to merchandising, magazines, music etc.. For a good televovela there is the possibility to make a profit of $7 off-screen for every $1 on screen from things like live shows and merchandising. The fifth department is new media, Cellular, Internet, IP TV etc. We produce content for internet and cellular telenovela. Next month we are launching an internet site (www.telenovela.com) that will change the Telenovela world. This site will be the new site for the 2 billion people who watch telenovelas in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the USA.

All the TV shows can be shown as is, subtitled, dubbed or can be sold as a format. Selling a format allows us to profit while allowing the format to be custom tailored to its local market. For our internet site (www.telenovela.com), we have been working over a year and a half on perfecting it. We are going to focus on user generated content and networking while maintaining an encyclopedia about telenovelas, as well as trailers. We will have six journalists who will broadcast all of the telenovela news from around the world.

We are entering into a joint venture with a cellular provider in Argentina who will broadcast special content on the cell phone. We hope to catch more and more people who will live in this internet site. We want to build a community that will contribute new content such as the encyclopedia. We hope this telenovela site (www.telenovela.com) will be a worldwide provider of content for fans and distributors.

In August of 2007, we launched with Google five channels on you tube. In the last nine months we have had over 25 million people who have watched our clips. Thus Google began to sell advertising and we get a share of the revenue. This site showed us the potential of our own full blown website. So these 25 million people have been exposed to the idea of our upcoming web site. We guaranteed to produce 150 clips a month. Today we have 1500 3-minute clips that we are using for our internet site. We have tremendous amounts of content. We have 4500 hours of shows, thousands of clips, access to other companies content that we bought and user generated content.

Dorimedia is traded on the London Stock Exchange and analysts expect us to double our turnover this year. We just opened a new channel for the cable company Hot. We are opening an HD channel and a children's channel. We buy content from major studios, process it for the local market and sell it to Hot. In short, by the end of the year we will be operating 17 channels around the world and at the present time, we are operating 13 channels.

United World
You mentioned MGM, Sony and Warner Brothers, are you planning on expanding your partnerships?

Mr. Nadav Palti

Yes we plan to buy from all of these companies and also sell to them. We just sold Lalola's format to Sony. We also deal with other major studios for which I cannot provide details. We want to expand our business with all of these players.

United World
You mentioned that you want to grow to become one of the largest channels in the world. What are your strategies for achieving this goal?

Mr. Nadav Palti

First of all creating partnerships is critical. We are starting to co-produce with a very large media company based in the US. Our unique business model is unique in the world. All of our competitors work differently. Take for example Televisa, the largest Latin American media company; their main revenue is local. We focus on the world market, we buy from them extensively, we sell to them and we partner with them when we sell formats. They are not really our competitors. Our local market is the world, when we produce we aim at the world, we see ourselves as an international player. We do not own the major media outlets and so we focus on international content.

Our unique approach that focuses on Telenovela provides us with an advantage and gives me the confidence that we can attain our goal. Due to the fact that we produce much, we can guarantee content just from what we create but we like to buy from other producers as well since we always want to provide the best but if one of our partnerships goes sour we are not dependent on them.

United World
Israel and the USA continue to have strong economic, ties amongst many other mutual interests. In 2006 bilateral trade totaled more the $30 billion and the USA continues to be the largest export market for Israel. How important is the American market for MAPAL?

Mr. Nadav Palti

Last year we declared that it is the year of America. That is why Dorimedia opened a company, DMA - Dori Media America, with offices in Miami. We have two markets, the Hispanic market with a buying power that is uncanny. We want to approach the mainstream American market which is very important to us. We have all kinds of joint ventures, production, distribution, internet content, licensing etc.

United World
Targeting the international arena, MAPAL plans to expand your business activities, form new alliances worldwide, and take its place as a prominent brand name in the global communications community. What do you need to do to increase your visibility in the US?

Mr. Nadav Palti

We need to increase joint ventures. We maintain our production standards and we know how to produce inexpensively in high quality. We work with all of the big companies right now, and therefore our main goal is to penetrate with our channel. We have the base to penetrate the market and now it is a matter of time.

United World
It is always interesting to learn more about the people we interview, what is an accomplishment of which you are most proud?

Mr. Nadav Palti

I think that we want to be the leading company in the telenovela field in the world. We want to be important in production, distribution, have a major TV channel, and have a world center internet site. If each one of these departments will be the biggest, I will be very satisfied. We have the ability to do it because we have a unique angle from which we look at the market. We do not see the market as a local one but rather as a world market.

United World
What is a key message you would like to send to our readers?

Mr. Nadav Palti

Dorimedia thinks of them. We think about what our customers want to see.