Video Sharing – StartUpArabia

NaqaTube is a service that was launched a couple of months ago from Saudi Arabia, and that aims to offer a clean alternative to YouTube, preventing youth from watching profane or sexually explicit video clips online. (The word ‘Naqa’ means ‘pure’ in Arabic.)

The site features a collection of “clean” and edited clips from YouTube, cutting out all profanities or sexually explicit clips, as well as censoring videos that are deemed negative towards to the Kingdom’s government, scholars and citizens in general.

In keeping with strict religious guidelines, clips that have music are edited and their music removed, while images of women are banned. NaqaTube visitors are also able to edit their own clips through the site before uploading them online.

Much of the material on the site is religiously inclined and the site’s front page displays links to over 10 channels mainly featuring scholars, preachers, children and other Islamic-related material.

According to one of the moderators of NaqaTube, the site has received nearly 5,000 to 6,000 visitors since its launch two months ago.

NaqaTube was created by Saudi web development company House.

Tvosz, the Egyptian video sharing service, has launched a new video player, which looks neater, is quite faster, and introduces a number of new options like the possibility to control brightness, contrast and saturation; and direct access to a mini guide of other videos (related, top rated, most viewed, recent, …etc) while your video loads.

In addition to the new video player, Tvosz brings advertisers a number of new advertising options that they can use on the site, including:

Premium videos: these are prominently displayed in the video guide window to attract viewers.
Pre-roll Advertising: these are displayed before the video the user chose to view.
Post-roll Advertising: these are displayed directly after the video the user chose to view.
Mid-roll Advertising: these are set to be displayed in the middle of the video being played by the user with a configurable start time; and giving users the ability to close these midroll ads or navigate between them.

Shown ads are also targeted by video channel, meaning that a person viewing videos about sports will get sports-related ads displayed to them.