Sean Nero

More than 15 mil­lion peo­ple across the Caribbean will ben­e­fit from a strate­gic broad­cast rights deal agreed and signed be­tween Ca­ble and Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and CANOC Broad­cast­ing Inc to tele­vise per­for­mances of re­gion­al ath­letes at the Rio 2016 Olympics from the open­ing to clos­ing cer­e­monies.

The an­nounce­ment was made by CANOC CEO Lar­ry Ro­many at a me­dia con­fer­ence at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day.

It means that view­ers in this part of the world will no longer be sad­dled with the North Amer­i­can per­spec­tive of the games since this is where Caribbean broad­cast­ers usu­al­ly ac­cess their feeds.

CANOC, a sub­sidiary of the Caribbean As­so­ci­a­tion of Na­tion­al Olympic Com­mit­tees, has se­cured the ex­clu­sive Olympic con­tent rights across all plat­forms to 20 Eng­lish-speak­ing coun­tries, as well as non-ex­clu­sive rights in ten non-Eng­lish speak­ing coun­tries through­out the re­gion.

In an ef­fort to en­sure that ma­te­r­i­al pack­aged met in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards, CANOC en­list­ed the ser­vices of glob­al sports broad­cast­er ES­PN to achieve this. ES­PN will al­so re­cruit the best sport­ing minds in the Caribbean to de­liv­er com­men­tary be­fore and af­ter ath­letes com­pete.

Ro­many said the pro­duc­tion deal with ES­PN will cost US$5 mil­lion but he de­clined com­ment on the val­ue of CWC's in­vest­ment as the ex­clu­sive tele­coms part­ner.

Like Ro­many, John Reid, pres­i­dent of CWC Con­sumer Group, did not dis­close the val­ue of the deal but was clear it was ar­guably the biggest of its kind in the re­gion.

"This is a com­ing out event for us. This is a way to prove to the peo­ple that we are go­ing to put our mon­ey where our mouth is. I think this is ab­solute­ly crit­i­cal for us," Reid said.

Un­der the agree­ment, CWC cus­tomers will view the games across 12 of its chan­nels, in­clud­ing its video on the de­mand ser­vice.

Ro­many said bars and restau­rants would al­so not be blocked from car­ry­ing the broad­casts.