In 1991 there was no such thing as private Arabic television. Every channel across the region belonged to a ministry, and every bulletin opened with whatever the ministry had done that day. Satellite changed the physics of the problem: a signal sent up from Europe came down everywhere, and no national broadcasting authority could stop it. What was needed was somebody willing to pay for it.
Two men were. Waleed bin Ibrahim Al Ibrahim, a Saudi businessman whose sister had married King Fahd, and Saleh Abdullah Kamel, a Jeddah financier, put MBC 1 on air from London in September 1991 — the first privately owned pan-Arab satellite television channel. London was not sentimental. It was where the facilities, the engineers and the editorial freedom were. The company stayed eleven years, bought the American wire service United Press International in 1992 for just under four million dollars, sold it again at the end of the decade, and then left.
On 1 January 2002 MBC went on air from Dubai Media City. What followed was a factory. English-language film channels, a children's channel, a music channel, an action channel, a channel for the Maghreb, channels for Egypt — and on 3 March 2003, weeks before the invasion of Iraq, Al Arabiya, launched as the Saudi answer to Al Jazeera and defined almost immediately by the war it was built in time for. By the group's twenty-fifth year it was running more than a dozen channels and was described by its own commentators as the last of the pan-Arab satellite pioneers still standing.
Then it moved again. In September 2022 the group inaugurated a headquarters in Riyadh; in January 2024 it listed on the Saudi exchange; in September 2025 the Public Investment Fund completed the purchase of 54 per cent. This is the part that makes MBC unusual as an institution to remember. It has been, in effect, three companies wearing one name — a London broadcaster, a Dubai content group and a listed Saudi media company — and each move took a generation of people with it. The person who arranged the first uplink and the person running a streaming P&L in Riyadh have almost nothing in common except an employer's initials.
What follows is the thirty-five years in order — the launches, the formats, the acquisitions and the listing, and also the parts the anniversary films leave out: the founder detained in Riyadh in 2017, the ownership that changed and was reported four different ways, the rights business that went elsewhere, the channels that closed. Where the record is contested it is marked as contested. That is the only honest way to write it.