Ja­nine Charles-Far­ray

Di­anne Bis­soon has been away from T&T for 21 years, but the Caribbean has al­ways been close to her heart.

Her first job out of col­lege–the Palm Beach At­lantic Uni­ver­si­ty, Flori­da–was at the lo­cal ca­ble TV com­pa­ny Adel­phia, which she helped the get out of bank­rupt­cy dur­ing her time there.

Of her many years of ex­pe­ri­ence in the ca­ble and TV in­dus­try, she spent sev­er­al at Com­cast as se­nior mar­ket­ing man­ag­er, fol­lowed by a di­rec­tor of mar­ket­ing po­si­tion at West­Star TV in the Cay­man Is­lands.

Bis­soon was then head-hunt­ed by Ca­ble and Wire­less to work as VP of tele­vi­sion and en­ter­tain­ment and was di­rect­ly re­spon­si­ble for set­ting up Lime TV in Bar­ba­dos, Cay­man Is­lands and St Lu­cia.

En­ter 2015 and the soft launch of MAS2TV.

The acronym MAS2TV, re­flects the gen­res to be of­fered by the plat­form–Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, Arts, Sports and So­ci­ety–brought to tele­vi­sion with the whim­si­cal flare of the Caribbean iden­ti­ty. The ser­vices in­clude video on de­mand, live stream­ing and user up­loaded chan­nels.

At the soft launch of the dis­tri­b­u­tion plat­form on Jan­u­ary 15 at Aria night­club in Wood­brook, Bis­soon ad­dressed the au­di­ence along with chief mar­ket­ing of­fi­cer Cathy Dunn. An­oth­er mem­ber of the MAS2TV team con­firmed but not in at­ten­dance was chief tech­ni­cal of­fi­cer Clever­ston Miller of Bar­ba­dos.

Bis­soon has been amass­ing Caribbean con­tent over the last four years. With over 60 hours of orig­i­nal pro­gram­ming al­ready in hand, she and her team are look­ing to T&T for new con­tent op­por­tu­ni­ties in­clud­ing host­ing orig­i­nal pro­gram­ming and pro­vid­ing on­line stream­ing of live events such as Car­ni­val.

"I was the one who brought the team of ex­perts down and we were re­al­ly try­ing to as­sess how to ex­port the as­sets of Car­ni­val to the HBOs and these oth­er big in­dus­try gi­ants, but we thought, we might as well do it our­selves."

MAS2TV's CMO Cathy Dunn has over 20 years of ex­pe­ri­ence in mar­ket­ing and ad sales for US-based tele­vi­sion com­pa­nies, in­clud­ing work at FOX Net­works, Vi­a­com's MTV and Com­e­dy Cen­tral.

Dunn in­sist­ed on the im­por­tance of qual­i­ty of the tech­ni­cal of­fer­ing of MAS2TV and cit­ed sev­er­al bad ex­pe­ri­ences that some view­ers in the US have had with past paid on­line stream­ing ser­vices from the Caribbean.

"We're go­ing to start on­line and then branch off in­to oth­er plat­forms like ca­ble and so on. The most im­por­tant thing was for us to launch be­fore Car­ni­val and get go­ing."

MAS2TV's plan for mar­ket reach in­cludes a first and sec­ond quar­ter pro­jec­tion for cap­tur­ing sev­er­al au­di­ence ter­ri­to­ries in­clud­ing the Eng­lish, Span­ish, French and Dutch-speak­ing Caribbean, along with the USA, Cana­da, UK, Africa, Chi­na, Japan, Mex­i­co, and Brazil mar­kets.

When asked about oth­er Caribbean con­tent dis­trib­u­tors such as Stu­dioAnan­si.TV, Caribbean­Tales TV, stream­ing sites like Car­ni­valTV.net and oth­er ded­i­cat­ed con­tent plat­forms al­ready in op­er­a­tion with­in the Caribbean, Bis­soon was con­fi­dent that MAS2TV would of­fer some­thing dif­fer­ent. She tout­ed MAS2TV's au­di­ence track­ing, tar­get­ed com­mer­cial ad­ver­tis­ing and oth­er cus­tomis­able fea­tures.

"The good thing about the plat­form is that each con­tent provider will see who watched their con­tent, when, in which coun­try and how long they watched it for. They will be able to see every­thing."

Ac­cord­ing to Dunn, "That's what's so great about the dig­i­tal age now. With all the tech­nol­o­gy, in­ter­ac­tive ad­ver­tis­ing, be­ing able to track your au­di­ence and have a flex­i­ble con­tent mod­el are the fu­ture."

Film­mak­ers, TV pro­duc­ers and con­tent providers can look for­ward to a has­sle-free con­tent sub­mis­sion process via an up­load dock on the MAS2TV site, along with a screen­ing com­mit­tee process which will be the mech­a­nism through which con­tent is se­lect­ed for the plat­form.

Bis­soon al­so hint­ed that rev­enue splits and per sub­scrip­tion rev­enue share will be avail­able. Fur­ther de­tails on the busi­ness back­end such as con­tent rights, li­cens­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion me­chan­ics will be re­vealed in the fu­ture.

Bis­soon con­firmed that the MAS2TV ser­vice is ready. How­ev­er, it may take a few weeks be­fore the av­er­age Caribbean TV and Film lover can ac­cess the di­rect feed from their mul­ti­ple elec­tron­ic de­vices. The ser­vice mod­el will be paid on­line sub­scrip­tions pri­mar­i­ly, through Pay­pal, cred­it card or se­cure au­tho­rised In­ter­net pay­ment.

Dunn con­clud­ed by de­scrib­ing the wider vi­sion of the MAS2TV brand. "Not on­ly are we go­ing to be of­fer­ing the Caribbean to the Caribbean, but the Caribbean to the rest of the world."

Un­til the for­mal re­lease on the avail­abil­i­ty of sub­scrip­tions for pur­chase, per­sons in­ter­est­ed in ex­clu­sive Caribbean con­tent on MAS2TV can vis­it mas2tv.com.