Zawya Dow Jones reports that U.K. pay television operator British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC (BSY.LN) said Monday it has struck a joint venture with a private investment company owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan to launch a free-to-air Arabic-language news channel across the Middle East and North Africa region from 2012.

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RapidTVNews reports that James Murdoch has met with Arab media magnet Prince Alwaleed in Riyadh. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal holds a 5.7% voting stake in News Corp and is the second largest individual shareholder.

He has long been a fan of Rupert Murdoch’s methodology. The prince is also 100% owner of the fast-growing Rotana music and video channels business over the Middle East.

James Murdoch is on a four-day visit to Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital, and HQ of Kingdom Holdings (KHC) as a guest of Prince Alwaleed. KHC also owns a 29.9% share in Saudi Research & Marketing, itself giant local publishers, and James Murdoch was given a guided tour of the organisation.

A statement said simply: “The meetings touched upon future potential collaboration with News Corp and KHC”.

The meeting is not the first between the Arab prince and the Murdoch family. Back in 1999 Rupert Murdoch met with Alwaleed, along with Germany’s Leo Kirch and Mediaset in what was then called “Project Traviata”, designed to be a pan-European pay-TV empire. Those talks fell apart. Alwaleed has also tried to knock heads together in regard to pan-Arab pay-TV, and some years ago attempted to bring Orbit, Art and Showtime together under one roof. Again, those talks came to nothing.

This visit might be pure courtesy, and showing respect to a major and influential shareholder. But with European media stocks so cheap (relatively) and Prince Alwaleed’s cash fund, anything could happen.