Medal.tv, a short-form video-clipping service and social network for gamers, goes live with the acquisition of Rawa.tv, a Dubai-based Twitch rival that has so far raised around $ 1 million Streaming market. In the seven-figure bar deal, two of the founders of Rawa, Raya Dadah and Phil Jammal, will now become Medal and further integrations between the two platforms in the future.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is one of the fastest growing gaming markets and still one that is still largely unsatisfied, said Pim de Witte, CEO of Medal.tv, about his company’s interest in Rawa.
“Most of the companies targeting this market don’t really understand the nuances and try to replicate existing Western or Far Eastern models that are doomed to fail,” he said. “The inclusion of a local team increases Medal’s chances of success here. Overall, we believe MENA is an underserved market without a clear leader in live streaming and Rawa brings Medal the local market expertise we need to take advantage of this opportunity, ”added de Witte.
The Medal.tv community had been asking for the possibility of live streaming for some time, the managing director also noted, but the technology would have been too expensive for the startup to build with standard services of this scale, said de Witte.
“People are increasingly networking through live and real-time experiences, and our platform has been missing that until now,” he noted.
But as the first live streaming platform for Arabic games, Rawa had developed its own proprietary live and network streaming technology that is now used in all of its products. This technology is now coming to Medal.tv.
Photo credits: Medaille.tv
The two companies were already connected before today, as Rawa users were able to upload their gaming clips to Medal.tv and some Rawa partners had joined Medal Program for experienced players. In the future, Rawa will continue to operate as a separate platform, but will be more closely integrated with Medal, the company said. Rawa currently sees around 100,000 active users on its service.
The remaining Rawa team will continue to operate the live streaming platform after the deal is closed, under the leadership of co-founder Jammal, and Rawa’s headquarters will remain in Dubai. However, Rawa employees have been working remotely since the pandemic began, and it is unclear whether this will change in the future, given the uncertainty about the spread of Covid-19.
Medal.tv explained its further plans for Rawa on his websitewhere the company stated that it is not aiming to build a “generic” live streaming platform where the majority of viewers do not pay – a call that clearly seems to be directed at Twitch. Instead, it will focus on matching content with viewers who are interested in subscribing to the creators. This addresses one of the challenges that larger platforms like Twitch have faced in the past where It was difficult for smaller streamers to take off from the ground.
The company also said it will continue to focus closely on serving the gaming community rather than venturing into non-gaming content as others have done. Again, this is different from Twitch, which expanded over the years into vlogs and even streaming old TV shows. And it’s very different from YouTube or Facebook Watch, where games are just a sub-category of a wider video network.
The acquisition follows Medal.tv’s $ 9 million Series A, led by Horizons Ventures, in 2019 after the startup grew to 5 million registered users and “hundreds of thousands” of daily active users. Today, according to the company, over 200,000 people create content on Medal every day, and 3 million users actively view that content each month.