From Nostalgia to Innovation: Lila TV's Quest to Redefine Arabic Children's Content

It was March 2017, and I was heavily pregnant with my first child, worrying about anything and everything. On one of many sleepless nights, only one thought raced through my mind: what music would my future baby listen to, and what would she be watching as she grew up?

At that point in my life, I was very disconnected from the children's world and heavily invested in my animation company, Wezank, which produced animation videos for local and multinational organizations around the world. But that night, I took a trip down memory lane...

My generation grew up listening to cassettes of classic songs by Elias Rahbani (Kellon 3endon siyyarat, Ammi Bou Massoud, etc.), in addition to famous classics sung by Magida El Roumi, such as Tiri Tiri Ya Asfoura. And who could forget the impact of Remi Bendali's songs? But what about today's kids?

The world has changed so much since we were little kids, and it seemed that English and French content was now the preferred choice among parents. But that's probably because they don't have much of a choice.

My partner and husband, Toni Yammine, quickly searched online for Arabic content for children and found that it was either 1) imported dubbed content, 2) ultra-religious content, or 3) pirated content from the classics we listened to when we were young.

Yes, pirated. Unlike in the West, where most children's tunes are centuries-old rhymes, the songs we grew up listening to were written in the 1970s and 1980s. As of 2017, their writers and composers weren't benefiting financially from their masterpieces due to pirated copies being uploaded online all over the place.

This is how Lila TV was born: What if we reached out to the producers of our childhood songs and acquired the rights to adapt them for today's children? What if we used our expertise in animation to create authentic and meaningful music videos to accompany the new versions of the songs?

And that's what we did. We reached out to the songwriters and composers, and they happily joined the project, excited to see new life given to works they had filed away. In fact, when we contacted the composers, the general feeling was that they'd given up hope on ever monetizing this content. It was like they'd forgotten about it. Many were not aware of the piracy, some were but didn't know how to act about it. In general we received positive feedback from them since there was nothing to lose for them.

We started using any downtime we could find with our team at Wezank to work on these songs and videos. It was a risk we were willing to take because we were creating the content we wanted our own child to listen to and watch as she grew up. We knew we would have at least one person in the audience for our new YouTube channel, Lila TV.

When it came to creating the visual world of Lila TV, we decided to draw inspiration from our surroundings. We wanted children who watched our channel to see themselves in the characters and their world. This point was very important to me personally. My generation grew up watching more or less the same things: Walt Disney classics and a lot of dubbed anime. And deep down, I always felt like something was missing. Why didn't any character or their world or story look a bit more like me or the world I live in? That's why, for Lila TV, we made sure our characters had varied skin tones, and many of them had dark hair and dark eyes. For the settings, we drew inspiration from cities and villages in Lebanon, paying attention to details such as the types of trees, animals, and architecture. In order to make these visuals attractive, we tested a few character designs on different children and noticed that they loved looking at faces with big eyes and bright colors. That's how our signature visual style came to be.

We started with the classics, and upon seeing the soaring demand and success of these videos, we expanded to create our own original songs that would be enjoyed by today's children. With a mix of educational and entertaining content, our channel now includes over 400 pieces of content, of which have 100 music videos that both adults and children love to watch, and some of the original songs are starting to become even more popular than the classics!

Lila TV has grown to become part of many Arab households across the world, and the feedback we receive from them is so encouraging! With over 1 million subscribers and over 650 million views on our channel, we've expanded our Lila TV brand to include an online shop, drawing tutorials for children, a science show, a new channel with children's stories (@LilaTVStories), and we're currently developing our own animated series. Our focus is on spoken Arabic, especially in the Levant region where dialects are very close to each other. However, for classical Arabic, we have our monthly publication "Ashkal Alwan" that aims to teach classical Arabic for preschoolers. The dilemma is real, because they are two very different things: expats living in non-Arabic speaking countries want spoken content, and Arabs in the Arab world want this in addition to classical Arabic. So we try to reach both but our main focus is on spoken Arabic for now.

From when we first started in 2017, the spread has been through word of mouth and YouTube recommendations alone. We have not spent anything whatsoever on advertising our content. Our content advertises itself. And when the YouTube algorithm spots that people are watching and enjoying our content, it recommends it more.

We hold the copyright of our own original material, and of our partners' material. On YouTube, it's easy to control pirated content and we easily either monetize or remove it from the platform depending on the situation. However outside YouTube it becomes a matter of contacting the pirating person or organization directly and this can't always be done easily unfortunately.