On 8 October 2026, three companies filed a joint statement with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission that named, for the first time, who now sits at the very top of the ownership chain running down to Anghami, the Abu Dhabi-headquartered streaming service that is the largest single platform for recorded music across Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. The filer was not Anghami, and the filing was not about Anghami’s music catalogue. It was Skydance Corporation, reporting that two days earlier it had completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, and that the deal had made it the new ultimate parent of a stake Warner Bros. Discovery already held in Anghami’s chain of control.
No master recording changed hands. No publishing right moved. No artist’s catalogue credit will read any differently because of this filing. What changed is the answer to a question this publication has been tracking since 2024: who is standing behind the company that streams music to tens of millions of listeners across North Africa and the wider Arab world. As of 6 October 2026, the answer runs through a new name.
The chain, rebuilt from the bottom up#
Anghami itself is controlled by OSN Streaming Limited, a Dubai-based pay-television and streaming group that bought a majority stake in Anghami in 2024 and later proposed, in a still-unresolved and non-binding offer, to buy out the shares it does not already own at $3.75 a piece. OSN Streaming sits beneath Panther Media Group Limited and, ultimately, Kuwait Projects Company (Holding) K.S.C.P., the Kuwaiti investment group known as KIPCO, which is the controlling shareholder at the top of that part of the chain.
Warner Bros. Discovery entered this picture in 2025, when its subsidiary Dplay Entertainment Limited, an England and Wales company whose job is distributing content through WBD’s streaming services, bought a minority stake in OSN Streaming Limited itself: 19.84 percent as of the most recent disclosure, built toward a ceiling of 29.77 percent under a multi-tranche purchase agreement. That minority stake came bundled with something else: a call option giving Warner the right, from 1 July 2027, to buy out OSN Streaming entirely, priced with two different figures depending on whether Anghami’s music streaming business is included or excluded from the calculation, a $225 million floor without it and $302 million with it. Lawyers for the two sides also wrote in an explicit right for Warner to pursue what the contract calls a “Music Business Carve-Out”: the option to separate Anghami’s music streaming operation from the rest of OSN’s holdings entirely, as its own transaction.
Under United States securities rules, holding even a minority stake in a company that is part of a coordinated “group” can make a filer responsible for reporting the group’s whole position, not just its own slice. That is what happened here. Warner Bros. Discovery’s own direct stake in Anghami’s chain is 19.84 percent of OSN Streaming Limited, one corporate rung above Anghami itself. But because regulators treat Warner, Dplay Entertainment, OSN Streaming Limited, OSN Streaming Holding Limited, Panther Media Group Limited and KIPCO as a single reporting group, Warner’s SEC filings describe it as the beneficial owner of 71.3 percent of Anghami on a fully diluted basis. It is a legal attribution, not a change in who actually holds Anghami’s economics day to day. Readers should hold onto that distinction: a 19.84 percent direct stake in the holding company, reported as a 71.3 percent beneficial interest in the operating company, because of how the group is structured.
What actually happened on 6 October#
None of that changed on 6 October 2026. What changed is who stands above Warner Bros. Discovery. Under a merger agreement signed in February 2026, Skydance Corporation acquired Warner Bros. Discovery in a transaction widely reported in the business press at roughly $110 billion, one of the largest media deals in years. A Skydance merger subsidiary merged into Warner Bros. Discovery, which survived the transaction as a wholly owned Skydance subsidiary rather than disappearing into it. Two days after the deal closed, Skydance filed Amendment No. 4 to Anghami’s Schedule 13D, the disclosure document that tracks beneficial ownership of listed companies, adding itself as a reporting person alongside Warner Bros. Discovery and Dplay Entertainment Limited.
The filing is explicit that nothing about the underlying numbers moved. The 71.3 percent figure, the 19.84 percent direct stake, the $3.75 buyout proposal for Anghami’s minority shares, the $225 million and $302 million call option floors, the Music Business Carve-Out language: all of it carries over from the previous amendment, filed in September, unchanged. What the filing records is a change of ownership one level further up the chain than this publication had previously tracked. Warner Bros. Discovery did not acquire anything new in Anghami. Skydance acquired Warner Bros. Discovery, and inherited everything Warner already held, including its position in a Middle Eastern and North African music streaming service that Skydance itself had never previously been connected to in any public filing.
What is still unresolved#
Three things that were open questions before 6 October remain open questions after it. Anghami’s own minority shareholders have not accepted or rejected the $3.75-per-share buyout proposal from OSN Streaming Limited; it remains non-binding, with no definitive merger agreement filed anywhere on Anghami’s own SEC record. Warner’s call option over the whole of OSN Streaming Limited cannot be exercised before 1 July 2027, and nothing in the new filing suggests any step has been taken toward exercising it. And no document reviewed for this story, not the merger agreement, not the Schedule 13D amendment, not any statement from either company, addresses whether Skydance intends to use, ignore or renegotiate the Music Business Carve-Out option it has just inherited. The right to split Anghami’s music business out from the rest of the OSN relationship now sits with a company that, eighteen days earlier, was known for Top Gun sequels and Mission: Impossible, not for streaming music in Cairo or Casablanca.
What this means for artists#
For an Egyptian, Moroccan or Tunisian artist whose music streams on Anghami today, nothing changes immediately. Royalty rates, playlisting decisions and the platform’s day-to-day operations are set by Anghami and OSN Streaming Limited, not by whoever sits three or four corporate levels above them. No contract an artist has signed with Anghami, a label, or a publisher is affected by this filing.
What this filing does is put a flag in the ground for the next stage of a story this publication will keep tracking. A global media conglomerate now has, inherited rather than negotiated, the contractual right to carve Anghami’s music streaming arm out of its wider OSN relationship, and a separately unresolved option to buy out the rest of OSN Streaming Limited from July 2027. If either of those things happens, it could change who an Anghami artist’s distributor ultimately answers to, and under what kind of deal, in a way that today’s filing deliberately does not yet decide. Ownership structures built in holding companies and call options rarely change an artist’s life on the day they are signed. They tend to matter on the day they are exercised.
