The rise of international Video on Demand subscription services in the Arab world have introduced diversified representations of the region and its communities in transnational programming while equally affecting the existing local production industries alongside shifting regulatory and distribution models. Since 2020, international subscription platforms featuring Egyptian content have increased production opportunities for community-based writers and directors, offering decreased local censorship and a wider distribution base with sustainable financing production models (Peer, 2023). Their presence has altered local industry functions, widened the scope of representation in character formation and narrative storytelling, and presented an absence of justification to non-agreeable local and global audiences; simultaneously highlighting contradictory and complementary understandings of tradition rooted in cultural codes. Although the productions bear no obligation to please its audience, the burden of baring these representations (Mercer, 1994) is ever present surrounding notions of gender, religion, and class structure, and nationalism. While transnational broadcasters cater to transnational audiences, including diasporas and to a lesser extent the local population, they push the limitations on representation and distribution, simultaneously evading and conforming to national media systems (Jenner, 2018), bound by a domestic oligopoly (El Khachab, 2021), and a heavily surveilled production industry due to extensive media censorship laws. In 2022, and after the streaming of the Arab adaption of the film Perfect Strangers, Egypt’s Supreme Council for Media Regulation, Saudi Arabia’s General Commission for Audiovisual Media, and the Committee of Electronic Media Officials in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries demanded subscription services abide by the countries’ societal values, pressuring for the end to production of what they deem and describe as offensive content. In Egypt’s case, licensing regulations monitoring distribution rights and content regulations were introduced last September. It remains unclear how these decisions could affect the direction transnational platforms have taken in underlining global-local relations (Straubhaar, 1991) covering the Arab national and Egyptian identity, alongside reviving, and competing with the local production industry. The proposed paper focuses on highlighting the expansive and potential threatening roles Netflix and Shahid VIP play as industry shapers facilitating changes in representation and production, in conjunction with altering distribution and regulatory models in Egypt.