Mark Lyn­der­say

On Mon­day last week, an­oth­er seis­mic shift in the lo­cal telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions in­dus­try hap­pened. In a qui­et room at Flow's Port-of-Spain of­fice, yet an­oth­er name was added to the list of own­ers of the once lo­cal ca­ble com­pa­ny.

This time, Lib­er­ty Glob­al, a multi­bil­lion-dol­lar ca­ble and broad­band com­pa­ny based in the US and UK and owned by John Mal­one, quite lit­er­al­ly phoned in the takeover, an­nounc­ing the clo­sure of the deal on a re­gion­al tele­con­fer­enc­ing call.

CEO Mark Freis made the an­nounce­ment from Den­ver, Col­orado and field­ed five min­utes worth of ques­tions from me­dia rep­re­sen­ta­tives from each of the ma­jor ge­o­graph­ic mar­kets that now fall un­der Lib­er­ty's grow­ing um­brel­la of ca­ble and broad­band cov­er­age.

Lib­er­ty Glob­al is the largest pay ca­ble-TV and broad­band provider in the world, re­port­ing rev­enue of US$18.2 bil­lion in 2014.

The com­pa­ny, which has a com­mand­ing pres­ence in Eu­rope, has been buy­ing com­pa­nies vig­or­ous­ly since 2013, spend­ing US$24 bil­lion on Vir­gin Me­dia and tak­ing a 58 per cent con­trol­ling in­ter­est in Bel­gium's Te­lenet that year.

In 2014 it added Dutch ca­ble provider Zig­go and in 2015 bought The TV3 Group, an Irish free-to-air TV net­work. In No­vem­ber 2015, it is­sued its prospec­tus (http://ow.ly/NR­cp300soXB) for buy­ing Ca­ble & Wire­less (CWC) and com­plet­ed that deal to­day at a cost of US$7.4 bil­lion, the en­ter­prise val­ue of the ac­qui­si­tion, scoop­ing up the com­bined as­sets of Colum­bus, Flow, CWC and all the debt as­so­ci­at­ed with the re­cent buy­out deal.

They will add four mil­lion ca­ble-TV sub­scribers and a fixed broad­band ser­vice with two mil­lion sub­scribers to the 60 mil­lion they cur­rent­ly serve in Eu­ro­pean mar­kets.

"Tech­nol­o­gy pen­e­tra­tion com­pared to Eu­rope sug­gests great op­por­tu­ni­ties," Fries said.

Plans for Ja­maica, for in­stance, will tar­get the sub­stan­tial parts of the coun­try that are ready for sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­proved ser­vice.

"We un­der­stand this re­gion very well. We have been in­vestors for 20 years (Lib­er­ty of­fers ser­vice in Puer­to Ri­co and Chile) and we are long-term in­vestors."

"There may be un­cer­tain­ties in some mar­kets, but over­all we see great growth po­ten­tial in the re­gion. There is tremen­dous de­mand among con­sumers for broad­band da­ta."

"We are see­ing that growth in­creas­ing by 50 per cent every year. There is no oth­er in­dus­try with that kind of growth po­ten­tial"

"Broad­band varies by mar­ket, some are ad­vanced in terms of pen­e­tra­tion and speed and we'd like to change that."

"Our typ­i­cal cus­tomer is re­ceiv­ing a 100mb con­nec­tion, and the tech­nol­o­gy ex­ists for us to do that here, over time. We are glob­al­is­ing at a rapid pace, and we are us­ing the same tech­nolo­gies in all mar­kets."

One of those tech­nolo­gies is Lib­er­ty's sig­na­ture Hori­zon TV, a mul­ti-plat­form me­dia ac­cess ser­vice which sep­a­rates ac­cess to the ca­ble-TV ser­vice from a tele­vi­sion and pro­vides an ex­pe­ri­ence that merges cloud-based Net­flix-like ac­cess to archived films and se­ries and Hu­lu-style mo­bile ac­cess to a live tele­vi­sion line­up.

Will the mar­ket clout it has ac­quired in oth­er mar­kets of­fer an edge in en­cour­ag­ing le­gal feeds from con­tent providers who have been hith­er­to un­in­ter­est­ed in the small Caribbean mar­ket?

"We spend 2.5 bil­lion on con­tent from providers all around the world," said Fries, "time will tell."

The com­pa­ny was equal­ly non-spe­cif­ic about its plans for the 49 per cent share­hold­ing in TSTT it will in­her­it along with CWC, which has not been able to liq­ui­date that in­vest­ment to date, and the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty may have some le­git­i­mate con­cerns about the time it's tak­ing to reg­u­larise that un­tidy sit­u­a­tion.

"We have en­gaged all the rel­e­vant par­ties in mak­ing the sale of TSTT hap­pen. We re­spect all the reg­u­la­to­ry re­quire­ments. (But) sell­ing the 49 per cent will re­quire a buy­er will­ing to buy, but not con­trol the com­pa­ny."

So will Flow's head­quar­ters need a new set of brand­ing?

Ap­par­ent­ly not. The Lib­er­ty CEO has no im­me­di­ate plans to change ex­ist­ing brand­ing (ear­ly con­jec­ture about the im­pact of the deal is here: http://ow.ly/fY­wY300sp­kL).

"We ex­pect things to be busi­ness as usu­al. We will be get­ting bet­ter ac­quaint­ed and for the next few months you won't see much change. We will look at each mar­ket in­de­pen­dent­ly and de­ploy the right so­lu­tions. It's not one size fits all." Fries said.

Lib­er­ty is con­sid­er­ing con­tent and tech­nol­o­gy plat­forms to serve the hos­pi­tal­i­ty in­dus­try in the re­gion and in Bar­ba­dos specif­i­cal­ly.

"We are big be­liev­ers in Wi-Fi net­works, we have six mil­lion hot spots in Eu­rope and en­sur­ing that ac­cess is per­va­sive and easy to use is a crit­i­cal as­pect of the busi­ness."