“As soon as we ended our trial period for the new online channel, we decided to launch it on Sep. 24 (The Saudi Embassy is celebrating the national day on the same day at the King Fahd Academy in London) to be able to connect all Saudis celebrating this day abroad in countries such as the UK, US, Canada and Sweden where our colleagues are based,” said co-founder Fawaz Saad.

MVR, Saad added, is a not-for-profit media group established in 2010. Its first venture was a radio channel run with the help of his colleagues Hamza Al-Safi and Ibrahim Al-Sini at Glasgow Caledonian University.

In the beginning its airtime was limited to one hour every Monday from 5 to 6 p.m. in Arabic.

Due to the huge demand and ideas that started to flow within the team, he added, they created a website and fan pages on Facebook and Twitter.

“We then managed to get our own studio and started to air for 24 hours, dedicating our news to all Saudi students here and outside the UK,” said Saad. The team also created an iPhone application for the radio station and offers SMS features for their subscribers.

The 18-strong team, consisting of both men and women, are either media students or already working in the industry. They are optimistic launching the new online TV channel will be a turning point for the group.

After engaging with their fans as much as possible, Saad said, the channel has secured interviews with well-known speakers such as the Saudi Cultural Attaché in the UK and Ireland Ghazi Al-Makki, Undersecretary for Scholarship Affairs Abdullah Al-Moussa, and Turki Al-Dakhil, host of the show “Spotlights” on Al-Arabiya news channel.

In addition MVR is becoming the radio channel of choice to cover Saudi events in the UK and will be the official media sponsor to broadcast the first annual Arab Media Academics Forum to be held in London on Oct. 29th, he said.

Further projects, he added, will include an online newspaper.