Why Netflix isn't really competing for Pakistan

A long absence and a sharper focus

The episode opens with Muzamil apologising for a long gap between episodes and resetting what Thought Behind Things is going to be from this point forward. Politics, he says, will come and go. His core interest now sits “exclusively” in startups, in economics, in business and in tech — and specifically in the kind of operator who is trying to do something disruptive inside a particular Pakistani industry while the wider economy stabilises.

That framing matters, because the guest he introduces next is the test case. Jonathan Mark, he tells the audience, has “a foreign-sounding name but is a Pakistani gentleman” with two decades of media experience: Zee from the late nineties, the launch teams for CNBC Pakistan, Samaa TV and KTN, and now a new hat — trying to disrupt streaming in a country Muzamil openly says he is sceptical can sustain a paid streaming business. “Streaming, I don’t know if it can run in a piracy-infested market like Pakistan,” he tells Jonathan on the way into the conversation. The rest of the episode is Jonathan answering that scepticism on the numbers.

Selling Corollas before selling channels

Before getting to begin.watch, Muzamil walks Jonathan through how he ended up in media at all. Jonathan was born in Muscat to a Pakistani father and an Indian mother, moved to Karachi after his parents separated, and finished O and A levels there. Between A levels and college he took seven months off and sold cars — Corollas, at Indus Motors and Toyota Central Motors, in the wholesale belt of Jodia Bazaar.

Muzamil pauses on this. He wants to know whether the gap year was about survival money or about wanting to enjoy being young. Jonathan says it was both, and then makes a point Muzamil clearly likes: sitting across the table from procurement officers at small and medium businesses at that age taught him work culture far earlier than university would have. The line he lands on is the one Muzamil quotes back at him later in the conversation: “You can’t judge a book by its cover. A person walks in, you think this guy is just going to look at the car, and twenty minutes later he has bought ten.”

He went to college for media and marketing between 1994 and 1996 — a strange thing to study in Pakistan at the time, by his own admission — and joined Zee in Dubai as a sales executive on graduation. He clarifies one biographical detail Muzamil gets slightly wrong in the introduction: he did not launch CNBC Pakistan, he joined it. He was, however, on the launch teams for Samaa and KTN.

A decade at Zee, and the eight-foot dish

Jonathan stayed at Zee for almost ten years, leaving in 2007. The texture he gives that period is worth slowing down on, because it sets up everything he says later about distribution and piracy.

When Zee arrived in Pakistan in the mid-nineties, there were exactly two channels in the country — PTV and NTM. Zee came in through a “completely legal” piece of hardware: an eight-foot dish, an LNB, a receiver, and a smart card slot, all sold openly in the Saddar electronics market in Karachi for somewhere between six and ten thousand rupees depending on the box. That was a steep price. Jonathan, working out of Dubai, was selling advertising — not hardware — into a Pakistani market with only three channels and roughly twenty agencies, of which only four handled the fifteen-odd Unilever brands. It was, he says, a small enough world that he met Rehan Merchant — then at Procter and Gamble, now the long-running CEO of Park Mediacom and his current co-founder at begin — across a Zee pitch in 1998.

He left Zee for Zafar Siddiqui’s group in 2007 — Siddiqui being a chartered accountant and former KPMG managing partner who had built Telebiz, CNBC Arabia, CNBC Pakistan and then Samaa. Jonathan stayed at Samaa for sixteen years through a change of ownership in 2021, ran the digital revenue vertical and Samaa FM, and finally left in May 2023 to build begin.watch with Rehan.

The product, and why owning the tech matters

begin.watch went live in July 2024. Jonathan describes it cleanly: a premium subscription SVOD platform priced at $9.99 a month, available on iOS, Android, web and connected TV, geo-locked to Pakistan. “You cannot watch anything on begin if you’re in Dubai,” he tells Muzamil, with some pride. “That’s how good we are.”

The catalogue is built on three of the five major Hollywood studios — NBC Universal, Sony Pictures and Paramount — plus a deliberately heavy sports lineup: PSL, English Premier League, the Masters, AEW wrestling, the Sultan Azlan Shah hockey cup, and a soon-to-be-announced La Liga partnership. Local Urdu drama acquired from linear TV sits alongside, and two original Pakistani dramas are about to launch.

Muzamil presses on technology. The standard Pakistani pattern, he points out, has been telcos buying a white-label streaming stack and bolting it onto a marketing campaign — and the user experience has always suffered because the telco never owned the tech. Jonathan’s answer is that begin’s stack is in-house, ground-up, built by an ex-Tamasha engineer named Nabil and his team. The stress test he offers is concrete: during the conversation, the platform was simultaneously running PSL matches, the Masters golf and Premier League fixtures without crashing — something Jonathan notes another local app failed at “two or three years ago” when PSL traffic overwhelmed it. The longer game, he adds, is to white-label that tech to other markets as a second revenue line, but that is years away.

On scale, he is unusually direct for a founder. Around 25,000 to 30,000 monthly active paying subscribers at $9.99 a month. Significant downloads on top of that. Not profitable, not pretending to be, currently closing what he describes as a pre-Series A round even though there is already meaningful revenue running through the business. He says begin should be in a position to put money back into the business within eighteen to twenty-four months.

How a Pakistani platform got Oppenheimer for a tenth of the price

The most striking section of the conversation is Jonathan’s explanation of how begin acquired premium Hollywood content as a Pakistani startup. The mechanism, in his telling, is a quiet feature of the global streaming economy that Pakistani operators can actually exploit.

When the big global platforms — Netflix, HBO, Disney — talk about “the subcontinent,” they mean India. Pakistan is a rounding error on those licensing deals. Netflix, by Jonathan’s count, has roughly 450,000 paying subscribers in Pakistan. Bangladesh adds maybe another 250,000 to 300,000. Netflix is not, he says flatly, looking at Pakistan. “It’s a nice to have, but they are not actively putting towards that.”

That gap is what Jonathan and Rehan walked into. He gives the Oppenheimer negotiation as a worked example. Netflix had paid roughly $250,000 for subcontinent rights to Christopher Nolan’s film, with a cooling-off period before any second platform could license it. Jonathan went to NBC Universal — through a friend-of-a-friend network he had built over twenty years — and made the argument that Pakistan was a dark market, that Netflix was already paying x, and that NBC could collect x plus a Pakistan-specific premium on top of it. NBC agreed. The contract was signed end-May 2024 and the catalogue went live in July, with an exclusive window that lasted until Netflix put the title up in Pakistan on 21 March 2025. By then, he says, the people who wanted it had already watched it on begin.

The headline number he gives Muzamil is the one to remember: “We picked it up for one-tenth the price.” Sony Pictures and Paramount, he says, were persuaded by the same argument — a dark market, a price floor below what they were already getting, and a partner who would actually fight the piracy that was bleeding them anyway. The studio deals are locked in for three years because, as Jonathan puts it, “we figured the price would go up once they saw the traction.”

Piracy is an ISP problem, not a torrent problem

Muzamil pushes hard on the piracy question. He describes the Pakistani consumer who goes to a free streaming site full of viruses, the Nayatel-style ISP that quietly bundled a torrenting front-end into its package, and a market where “first attempt” is usually a pirated copy. How do you build a paid product on top of that?

Jonathan splits the problem in two. Torrents he treats as a global, unsolvable, expert-user issue — a thousandth of the market, present in the US and India too. The real problem in Pakistan is the ISPs and cable operators, who package pirated content into a paid bundle the consumer believes is legitimate because they are handing over fifteen hundred to two thousand rupees a month for it. “The consumer doesn’t know it’s pirated,” he says. “They are paying for it.”

The play begin is running on top of that has three layers. First, it joined the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, the global anti-piracy body whose members include HBO, Disney, GeoStar, StarSports, Bein, OSN, Shahid and NBC. Membership took several months because ACE vets you as a real business; once in, begin had access to ACE’s enforcement muscle and to partnerships with regional players like Bein and OSN. Second, his legal team obtained Pakistani court stays on every title begin has rights to — a job he says would normally take years. Third, and this is the interesting part: begin is not trying to sue the ISPs. It is trying to license to them. He describes offering ISPs twenty movies a month on a rotating basis, a feed they can plug into their VOD offering and resell to their customers. The argument to the ISP is straightforward — improve the customer experience, stop being a piracy lawsuit waiting to happen, and pay for content that you can actually market. He gives a worked example from golf: begin paid significant money to the PGA, took the main feed, gave the secondary feeds to partners, and slapped a banner on the secondary feeds pointing back to begin.

Sports is the wedge, not drama

Muzamil takes the conversation into a wider question about Pakistani sports. The pattern, he argues, is always the same: a Pakistani athlete or sport reaches some level of global success, the conversation reverts to “the government should do more”, and nothing happens. He rejects the framing entirely. A developing-country government with one of the lowest tax-to-GDP ratios in the region is not going to fund a league. In India, he points out, it was private capital that mainstreamed every category — and sport was no exception.

Jonathan agrees, and then narrows the argument to something more useful. The early data from begin’s first year, he says, is unambiguous: sports is the single biggest subscription driver. Western premium content gets people in the door; sports keeps them there. Local original drama is the third pillar — the begin originals about to launch — because customer service feedback has been heavy on “when are you bringing your own?”

The La Liga partnership he describes is the template for how he wants begin to operate as more than a streamer. La Liga already runs outreach programmes in markets like Iraq and Egypt. begin is going to bring two La Liga academy players into Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad every quarter, run tournaments under the La Liga brand, and let interest cascade — schools, colleges, universities, teams, advertisers — into the football ecosystem the country has not yet built. Rehan’s PSL experience, he notes, is the operating manual.

Muzamil presses him on whether Pakistan will get a proper, government-endorsed football league with city franchises. Jonathan’s answer: yes, soon, and Rehan is working on the framework. Other sports follow the same logic. MYCO, he is generous enough to credit, did a real job with the Squash World Championship, and the Pakistani win that followed has visibly refilled squash courts.

Arslan Ash, kabaddi and the heroes Pakistan does not promote

The episode opens, in its cold-open clip, with a riff Muzamil and Jonathan return to later: Arslan Ash, the Pakistani Tekken world champion. Muzamil’s frustration is open. Arslan did not just win — he built a team of Pakistanis who now dominate global Tekken, was picked up by Saudi Arabia, and is being used by the Saudis to anchor their own esports city. The Pakistani esports community waits for his next Twitter clip. No Pakistani platform, broadcaster or sponsor has built a product around him.

Jonathan does not dispute the diagnosis. His answer is that linear TV, streaming platforms and sports channels have to take the responsibility on collectively. The job is not to stream a match; it is to construct a story around the athlete — training, behind-the-scenes, ground events. That is what is missing. Once that visibility exists, he argues, the advertiser comfort follows, and the snowball starts. He is honest that begin is not large enough yet to do that alone; the comment is a statement about the industry, not a roadmap for his company.

Muzamil and Jonathan riff briefly on kabaddi as the proof that the model works. The Pro Kabaddi League in India took an unmistakably rural game and re-rendered it as a glossy, urban, primetime product. Pakistan was meant to stream the Kabaddi World Cup earlier in 2025 through begin, but the Pakistan team could not get UK visas in time and the platform pulled out.

Where this is actually going

The closing third of the conversation is where Jonathan lays out the bet underneath the entire business. He is explicit that begin is not optimising for next year’s P&L.

The streaming war in India, he points out, has gone through the roof. Disney sold its India assets to JioStar; Warner Brothers and Viacom are effectively plug-ins on the same app. India has a ceiling, and the global streamers are going to hit it. The Middle East is already crowded — StarzPlay, Netflix, Shahid, OSN, each holding a niche. So what is left?

His answer is the 450 million-person belt of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Roughly fifty percent of the population under thirty. Close to two hundred million smartphone users in rough aggregate across the three. A generation that does not want to switch on a TV at eight o’clock to watch a drama. He says it plainly: “These big players will eventually come to these markets. We want to be there all set, so when they come, let’s talk.”

Read in that light, every move begin has made fits one shape. The in-house tech stack is the asset that cannot be replicated quickly. The three-year studio deals are a price floor before the big platforms arrive. The sports rights are the audience moat. The ACE membership and the ISP licensing strategy are the defensible position on piracy. The La Liga grassroots programme is a brand the international platforms will not have built. The 25,000 to 30,000 paying subscribers are a proof point, not a target.

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil has stopped being sceptical about whether streaming can work in Pakistan and started asking how begin will be valued when it sells. Jonathan, characteristically, does not bite on the number. He repeats the line he has used three times by now: it can always be better. The next eighteen to twenty-four months, he says, is when the question gets answered.