The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

A MAJOR TV network yesterday said the English-speaking channel it developed for The Bahamas and wider Caribbean has cut piracy of its US transmissions across the region.

Javier Figueras, HBO Latin America’s corporate vice-president of affiliate relations,, speaking at a media roundtable organised by Cable Bahamas, said: “It takes a lot of investments to put together a channel for a certain region, and we certainly did for Latin America many years ago.

“Then we went on to the Caribbean and we also invested in the Caribbean to put together a channel that was a specific. Unfortunately, when we did the all this, we faced the fact that the Caribbean was a place where there was a lot of illegal transmission of the HBO channels from the United States.

“We came with an alternative and this alternative, at the end, at the beginning, it seemed like it was for Latin America. Now you’re coming into The Bahamas, and the reason Is that when we came to The Bahamas, we came to offer a new thing. It was a new channel, specifically for the Caribbean with new offering, with new content, fresh content.”

HBO in a letter to the US Trade Representative’s Office in late 2019, argued that the online piracy of TV programmes and related content “has increased significantly in The Bahamas”.

Describing the use of illegal online platforms to download and watch such programming as “alarming”, HBO Latin America called on the Bahamian government to also crack down on IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) and illicit streaming devices (ISDs) that it says were facilitating these copyright violations.

“Back in 2011 when we launched this HBO on Demand service in The Bahamas with Cable Bahamas, it was huge news. It was a great service. We were coming in with something very innovative for the Bahamians,” Mr Figueras said.

“Unfortunately, I will say a lot of people were very afraid of pressing the button in your control to access the movie. At any time, whenever you want to watch a movie, you were able to watch it and you still are able to watch it on HBO on Demand.

“But you have still people that are not the early adopters; that are afraid to press the button, thinking that they’re going to be charged for any particular movie as a rental. But no, we came in and we changed the story. We came with a new offering, HBO on Demand, and the same thing we just did about two years ago, when we first offered with Cable Bahamas, HBO Go as a new streaming service,” he continued.

“Again, this is a service that you are able to watch at any time in any device that you will like. Again, early adopters will get to watch and to, you know, to get to know the content through HBO Go, and there’s other people that are not so technical savvy that, unfortunately, they haven’t seen that there is a service that is called HBO Go.”

Mr Figueras said HBO was able to accomplish this “by going through the barriers of the windowing and being able to understand that the Caribbean is in itself a territory, and we if we want to really make an impact as a company, and we want to create a business out of this, we need to really tailor our service and create something that is really tailored for the Caribbean. And for Bahamians.”

David Burrows, Cable Bahamas marketing director, said: “With the HBO Go side of things that was very important. Where you may be introducing a programme and the words on the screen may be in a different language and so forth, with that innovation HBO on demand customers were able to access the programming 100 percent in English.”