On Tues­day, the Caribbean’s me­dia land­scape was blind­sided by the news that sports chan­nel Sports­Max and dig­i­tal news com­pa­ny Loop News were set to wind down their op­er­a­tions.

The de­ci­sion to shut down both en­ti­ties came from their par­ent com­pa­ny Dig­i­cel, with Loop ceas­ing op­er­a­tions im­me­di­ate­ly while Sports­Max will have its fi­nal broad­cast on Au­gust 8, 2025.

The de­ci­sion will af­fect over a dozen work­ers at­tached to Loop and over 80 work­ers at Sports­max. The work­ers are to be paid sev­er­ance pack­ages, the Busi­ness Guardian was told.

How­ev­er, giv­en the fi­nan­cial chal­lenges which have fol­lowed the Dig­i­cel group for the past few years, the news would not have been a sur­prise.

For­mer Loop News re­gion­al lifestyle and cul­ture man­ag­er Lau­ra Dowrich-Phillips not­ed that sev­er­al arms of Loop’s re­gion­al foot­print had been closed since her de­par­ture two years ago.

“It’s not sur­pris­ing, be­cause, as we all know, the board has changed and fi­nanciers who had want­ed to re­coup their mon­ey from the bond sale didn’t get it,” said Dowrich-Phillips, adding, “re­al­ly their fo­cus is to re­coup their mon­ey. So over the last two years, they’ve been a lot of peo­ple sent home. They’ve been shut­ting down dif­fer­ent de­part­ments and stuff in Dig­i­cel and it was in­evitable, I be­lieve that. A lot of the apps would have been shut down like be­cause at the end of the day, it’s about be­ing prof­itable, and I guess it’s a busi­ness de­ci­sion, so I’m not sur­prised by it.”

She con­tin­ued, “I know since I left, they had closed down some of the Loop sites, be­cause we had Loop sites across the re­gion, and the ma­jor­i­ty of them were shut down. So I think it was on­ly Ja­maica and Trinidad in the Caribbean that were still func­tion­ing.”

In Feb­ru­ary the com­pa­ny an­nounced jobs across the re­gion would be made re­dun­dant as part of a de­cen­tral­i­sa­tion plan to re­main rel­e­vant.

Dig­i­cel said that the plan would im­pact some roles at the group lev­el, al­beit in sev­er­al mar­kets such as Cay­man, El Sal­vador, Haiti, Ja­maica, St Lu­cia, Trinidad, and the US, and that it had start­ed a con­sul­ta­tion pe­ri­od with staff.

This plan was an­nounced about a week af­ter long-stand­ing Dig­i­cel T&T CEO Abra­ham Smith had bid farewell to that post.

In a memo sent at that time, Dig­i­cel’s Group CEO Marce­lo Catal­do said the com­pa­ny has its eyes firm­ly set on cre­at­ing a lean tel­co struc­ture that em­pow­ers the dri­ve for su­pe­ri­or val­ue cre­ation and puts its mar­kets in the dri­ving seat. The memo stat­ed fur­ther that the com­pa­ny has spent months care­ful­ly re­view­ing its or­gan­i­sa­tion to struc­ture and re-de­sign busi­ness to be fit for the fu­ture.

Ac­cord­ing to Dig­i­cel’s En­vi­ron­men­tal, So­cial and Gov­er­nance re­port for 2025, the group had 5,121 full-time equiv­a­lent em­ploy­ees at March 31 2025, while the av­er­age staff for the pe­ri­od from April 1, 2024, to March 31, 2025 was 5,290.

Pri­or to this re­trench­ment plan the com­pa­ny had en­tered in­to a con­sen­su­al re­struc­tur­ing sup­port agree­ment in June 2023 as Dig­i­cel sought to ad­dress its debt of US$3.8bil­lion.

The com­pa­ny’s fi­nan­cial trou­bles can be traced back to the mid-2010s. In 2016 a re­port pre­sent­ed by a fi­nan­cial re­search com­pa­ny stat­ed that Dig­i­cel’s debt of more than $6 bil­lion (€5.7 bil­lion) could prove prob­lem­at­ic for the com­pa­ny. How­ev­er, the com­pa­ny re­ject­ed that as­sess­ment, con­fi­dent that its in­vest­ments would turn things around.

Sports­Max and Loop were among those in­vest­ments, and the com­pa­nies had been pi­o­neer­ing in the re­gion.

Sports­Max, which was found­ed in 2002, be­came the first tru­ly es­tab­lished re­gion­al sports chan­nel and had a view­er­ship of over 1.5 mil­lion house­holds in 26 Caribbean ter­ri­to­ries. It man­aged to broad­cast ma­jor sport­ing events that would have pre­vi­ous­ly been shown on in­ter­na­tion­al chan­nels such as ES­PN and Fox Sports. Sports­Max merged with Dig­i­cel in 2014.

Loop, es­tab­lished in 2015, found a unique space with­in the Caribbean me­dia mar­ket, carv­ing out a niche as a dig­i­tal news source across the Caribbean.

“At Loop, we dis­rupt­ed the me­dia land­scape. There are peo­ple who’ve tried to do dig­i­tal me­dia be­fore, but I think be­cause you had the pow­er of dig­i­tal be­hind it, and we did it in such a big way. We were across the re­gion. We lit­er­al­ly showed that dig­i­tal me­dia could work in the Caribbean, and the mod­el that we used, we didn’t have to ad­here to a press time or a broad­cast time,” said Dowrich-Phillips.

“Across the Caribbean, me­dia hous­es start­ed to pay more at­ten­tion to their dig­i­tal pres­ence be­cause of us. We didn’t, I think, have the kind of re­sources oth­er me­dia hous­es had. So we re­al­ly had to work hard. We had small teams, and we worked around the clock, sev­en days a week to make this prod­uct work. And I think we did a re­al­ly good job of it.

“We worked re­al­ly, re­al­ly hard, and we es­tab­lished a brand. The brand be­came known. It was trust­ed across the re­gion. Across the Caribbean, there were many is­lands that were ask­ing for Loop to come to their is­land.”

How­ev­er, nei­ther of these achieve­ments could help the com­pa­nies out­run the dif­fi­cul­ties it faced, par­tic­u­lar­ly as its par­ent com­pa­ny Dig­i­cel en­tered in­to sig­nif­i­cant debt over the last decade.

Sports­Max in re­cent years had faced sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges re­tain­ing or se­cur­ing in­ter­na­tion­al con­tent which had pre­vi­ous­ly drawn view­ers to the chan­nel amid in­creased costs to se­cure broad­cast rights as well as in­creased com­pe­ti­tion.

In 2015 the chan­nel lost out on the re­gion­al rights to Eng­lish Pre­mier League broad­cast rights to Flow Sports. Sub­se­quent­ly, in the face of in­creased costs, Dig­i­cel part­nered with Flow to se­cure the broad­cast rights for the league in 2018 with a new chan­nel Rush broad­cast­ing those match­es.

Sports­Max and Flow would find them­selves with­out the EPL rights again when Ver­ti­cast Me­dia Group, head­ed by for­mer Sports­Max CEO Oliv­er Mc In­tosh, se­cured the rights in 2022. Dig­i­cel and Flow were tak­en to court by Ver­ti­cast as McIn­tosh’s com­pa­ny al­leged the com­pa­nies en­gaged in an­ti-com­pet­i­tive prac­tices by opt­ing not to car­ry Ver­ti­cast’s C Sport chan­nels in the ca­ble pack­ages around the re­gion.

Ver­ti­cast ran in­to fi­nan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties and ul­ti­mate­ly lost the rights to the EPL one year ear­ly, af­ter its chan­nels went blank for much of the lat­ter half of its sec­ond con­tract­ed sea­son of EPL cov­er­age.

Dig­i­cel said that the fan-favourite sports con­tent that Caribbean view­ers know and love will there­after be avail­able on oth­er sports chan­nels.

In the past year, Rush be­gan broad­cast­ing events which pre­vi­ous­ly had found a home on Sports­Max such as the UE­FA Cham­pi­ons League.