One month ago, the Eng­lish Pre­mier League end­ed. Man­ches­ter City were crowned cham­pi­ons af­ter surg­ing past an Ar­se­nal team that held pole po­si­tion for much of the sea­son.

City’s win was all too fa­mil­iar. It had been their third straight win and its fourth in the last five sea­sons.

In the Caribbean, the jour­ney would have felt a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Last April, Ja­maica-head­quar­tered me­dia group Ver­ti­Cast an­nounced it had se­cured the rights for the EPL.

Ca­ble providers Dig­i­cel and Flow, who had pre­vi­ous­ly co-owned the rights, an­nounced in Au­gust they would not be car­ry­ing the league at all. It left many lo­cal fans con­cerned.

One sea­son lat­er, Ver­ti­Cast pres­i­dent and CEO Oliv­er McIn­tosh how­ev­er is hap­py with the com­pa­ny’s ex­e­cu­tion in such a short pe­ri­od.

“I think the team that we have put to­geth­er is ex­cel­lent and has man­aged the first year in a very ac­cept­able way. You know, when we start­ed a com­pa­ny to start there was not a lot of time,” said McIn­tosh, “Nei­ther be­fore the start of the Pre­mier League sea­son nor with a lot of time to the run-up to the 2022 FI­FA World Cup. Yes, and we had to de­liv­er both as well as the NFL and some oth­er con­tent as well. At the same time, we were work­ing to de­vel­op chan­nels to broad­cast the Pre­mier League. And we were al­so work­ing on de­liv­er­ing the 2022 FI­FA World Cup to the re­gion to over 20 coun­tries, in­clud­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go, Ja­maica, Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, and Haiti. All through the re­gion in mul­ti­ple lan­guages.”

McIn­tosh ex­plained that the com­pa­ny, which is reg­is­tered in St Lu­cia, large­ly de­liv­ered what it had promised–wide avail­abil­i­ty of the Eng­lish Pre­mier League and oth­er ma­jor sport­ing events across the Caribbean via its app and ca­ble providers.

“In our eyes, the first year has been very suc­cess­ful. You know, we de­vel­oped and de­liv­ered as we com­mit­ted to the Pre­mier League re­gion­al dis­tri­b­u­tion via ca­ble, but we have about 23 ca­ble part­ners through­out the re­gion. We’d like that to be more but we have 23 ca­ble part­ners in Bermu­da Cay­man, An­tigua, St Kitts, Ja­maica, T&T, Guyana, Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic,” he said.

Flow and Dig­i­cel’s ab­sence from that list of providers have con­tin­ued to be a con­cern for fans, as they ac­count for a sig­nif­i­cant chunk of the ca­ble sub­scrip­tions avail­able in Trinidad and To­ba­go and the Caribbean.

McIn­tosh said the Ver­ti­Cast team would con­tin­ue to ne­go­ti­ate with the two providers as well as sev­er­al oth­ers, as his goal is to en­sure that the re­gion is well cov­ered in terms of op­tions to view these events.

“We ob­vi­ous­ly would be hap­pi­er if it was a lit­tle bit more wide­ly dis­trib­uted amongst all ca­ble op­er­a­tors and we’re still work­ing to­wards that. We’re very pos­i­tive about the fact that we think that what we of­fer will be able to be ac­cessed by all ca­ble view­ers and hope­ful­ly soon,” he said.

“We’re hope­ful that be­fore to start to the next sea­son which is in Au­gust or even the Ju­ly sum­mer se­ries we will be able to come to an agree­ment with all ca­ble op­er­a­tors in­clud­ing Dig­i­cel and Flow re­gard­ing the of­fer of CSport so we were are pos­i­tive about that. Ca­ble op­er­a­tors will see the val­ue in our chan­nel and the con­tent that we show, which pri­mar­i­ly is the Eng­lish Pre­mier League.” CSport is Ver­ti­Cast’s chan­nel, app and web­site.

How­ev­er, with­out Flow and Dig­i­cel pro­vid­ing the C Sports chan­nels, McIn­tosh con­firmed that the CSports app had done well.

He re­vealed T&T emerged as the app’s sec­ond-largest sub­scriber base af­ter Ja­maica. He al­so hailed the re­la­tion­ships that were de­vel­oped over the course of year, no­tably its part­ner­ship with TSTT. In Au­gust last year, TSTT’s sub­sidiary Am­plia an­nounced its ex­clu­sive ac­cess to CSport chan­nel via its ca­ble ser­vice and has since used the part­ner­ship to in­crease its cus­tomer base.

“The pos­i­tive is that we have a fan­tas­tic re­la­tion­ship with TSTT and the team there and they con­tin­ue to ac­tu­al­ly grow their ca­ble sub­scrip­tions.

“They may not be the largest in T&T, but they’re size­able enough and they’re do­ing very well with the dis­tri­b­u­tion of CSport on TSTT. Trinidad is ac­tu­al­ly the sec­ond-largest mar­ket for us right now. We have reached al­most 60,000 reg­is­tered users (in Trinidad and To­ba­go) as of the end of the sea­son. And we’re ex­pect­ing that to grow.”

In the ab­sence of the re­gion’s largest ca­ble providers, Ver­ti­cast al­so did busi­ness in the free-to-air mar­ket. In Sep­tem­ber 2022, it ac­quired CVM-TV in Ja­maica, while in De­cem­ber 2022 it agreed to a deal with CNC3 to show some live EPL match­es.

“It im­pact­ed us very pos­i­tive­ly. We struck a deal with Guardian Me­dia to do the World Cup and then we start­ed a deal for the Pre­mier League and every Sat­ur­day there was a live match on the CNC 3,” he said.

“And that’s one of the ways that we said that we would present not on­ly the Pre­mier League but sport in the re­gion, We don’t think that it should be, as it was in the past, where the match­es were ex­clu­sive to one plat­form.

“So if you didn’t have a cer­tain ca­ble com­pa­ny, you couldn’t get all the match­es. What we tried to do is spread as wide­ly as pos­si­ble. So we of­fered it on our app, we of­fered it on our ca­ble chan­nels, and then we al­so of­fered it to our part­ners which are free-to-air broad­cast­ers, CNC3 in Trinidad and To­ba­go and CVM in Ja­maica.

“We are soon to an­nounce such agree­ments in the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic and oth­er coun­tries. So the plan is to make sure that our sup­port­ing con­tent is broad­cast wide­ly as it is here in Trinidad and To­ba­go, and Ja­maica. We have pulled the mod­el from the first year so now. It’s just grow­ing that mod­el from there,” said McIn­tosh.

De­spite McIn­tosh’s as­ser­tion that the year was suc­cess­ful, CSport had faced its fair share of crit­i­cism over the year, most no­tably when both the App and the on-air chan­nels failed to broad­cast one of the sea­son’s most piv­otal match­es—Man­ches­ter City v Ar­se­nal — live.

McIn­tosh did not mince words, as ac­knowl­edged that Mur­phy’s law struck the com­pa­ny at that time.

“We were do­ing a lot of ac­tiv­i­ties around lead­ing up to that point be­cause that was sup­posed to be the de­cid­ing week right? It was not on­ly the City Ar­se­nal match there were a cou­ple of oth­er match­es that were quite crit­i­cal.

“We had a sys­tem fail­ure that we couldn’t just fix in time. Luck­i­ly we got it back up with­in two days. We know there was a lot of talk in the mar­ket, but it was sim­ply some­thing that was an er­ror on our side and we man­aged to it. We showed it back af­ter­ward. I know a lot of peo­ple were up­set about not see­ing it live but I was up­set. I’m an Ar­se­nal fan,” said McIn­tosh of the two-day fail­ure.

“Last sea­son we had 380 match­es played in the Eng­lish Pre­mier League and we showed 377 with­out fail­ure and that’s a mas­sive suc­cess for a com­pa­ny like ours. And we show them in mul­ti­ple lan­guages, in mul­ti­ple ter­ri­to­ries on mul­ti­ple plat­forms, free-to-air TV, TV, and OTT. So, you know, we pat our­selves on the back for what we thought was a very suc­cess­ful year,” he said, “Are we go­ing to have more chal­lenges in the fu­ture? Like­ly, but we’re go­ing to make sure we try to min­imise those and how it might im­pact our view­ers.”

McIn­tosh not­ed that the com­pa­ny had pro­vid­ed this ser­vice while still com­plet­ing a full year of op­er­a­tion.

“When peo­ple come to us nowa­days, and talk to us, it seems like they think that we’ve been around for five to ten years, not un­der­stand­ing that this month is June, we’re re­al­ly in­to our 10th month of op­er­a­tion. We’re not a year old yet. It feels like longer to most peo­ple be­cause of what we’ve achieved but it’s 10 months that we’ve been op­er­at­ing,” he said.

McIn­tosh said apart from ne­go­ti­at­ing new part­ner­ships CSports would al­so seek to in­te­grate lo­cal pro­gram­ming in­to its line­up, in the process de­vel­op­ing more em­ploy­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties in the re­gion.

Apart from the next Pre­mier League sea­son and the NFL, he ex­plained that the team is al­so prepar­ing to show Eu­ro 2024 and is look­ing at es­tab­lish­ing its own fan­ta­sy foot­ball com­pe­ti­tion for both the EPL and NFL.