It’s been an odd week for foot­ball fans in T&T.

On one hand, there was ex­cite­ment, as some of Eu­rope’s top leagues had start­ed their sea­sons.

On the oth­er there was great con­cern as the most watched of that lot, the Eng­lish Pre­mier League, would not be read­i­ly avail­able on the sports pack­ages of two of the coun­try’s main ca­ble tele­vi­sion providers Flow and Dig­i­cel.

The two com­pa­nies had joint­ly owned the rights pri­or and had pro­vid­ed cov­er­age of the pop­u­lar league on their Rush chan­nels, but in the past week, the high­lights of past EPL match­es were re­placed with stock car rac­ing and track and field high­lights.

This was due to the fact that the rights to the league had been se­cured by Ver­ti­Cast Me­dia Group.

Ver­ti­Cast had an­nounced the ac­qui­si­tion in March, with Pres­i­dent Ol­ly McIn­tosh giv­ing the as­sur­ance the ca­ble sub­scribers would not be left out as he promised the widest pos­si­ble ac­cess to EPL.

He said then, “We’re def­i­nite­ly not mov­ing away from pay-TV or our pre­mi­um ser­vices. What we’re look­ing to do is com­pli­ment the way it’s done cur­rent­ly. So we just think that com­bi­na­tion of tra­di­tion­al me­dia along­side pay-TV, ca­ble and try­ing and struc­tur­ing a way on dig­i­tal me­dia that al­lows for the av­er­age per­son to view the Pre­mier League and you know that doesn’t take place as much as it should right now. And we think we have come up with some ways that we can do that.”

But that sce­nario hasn’t quite worked out just yet as on­ly Am­plia signed on with Ver­ti­Cast to in­clude its brand new C Sport chan­nels in time for the start of the league.

In­stead on Au­gust 5, the day of the open­ing match of the sea­son be­tween Ar­se­nal and Crys­tal Palace, Flow post­ed a state­ment on its web­site where it told its cus­tomers, “We have been in ne­go­ti­a­tions with the new broad­cast rights hold­er Ver­ti­cast Me­dia Group for the past few months to con­tin­ue dis­trib­ut­ing the Pre­mier League to our Flow cus­tomers. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, we were un­able to reach an agree­ment that pre­vents us from charg­ing our cus­tomers more for what they’ve come to ex­pect from us over the years.”

This state­ment prompt­ed Ver­ti­Cast to is­sue an open let­ter to Flow, which of­fered a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on the sit­u­a­tion.

Ver­ti­cast said in that state­ment, “Ver­ti­Cast has sub­mit­ted mul­ti­ple pro­pos­als to Flow over the last cou­ple of months to reach a so­lu­tion and en­sure fans have ac­cess to the Pre­mier League.”

The com­pa­ny con­tin­ued, “Our most re­cent pro­pos­al (Ju­ly 28) is struc­tured on favourable terms and in­cludes 3 CSport chan­nels plus the FI­FA World Cup rights to FLOW for cer­tain coun­tries; Via email, Flow con­firmed re­ceiv­ing the of­fer on Ju­ly 29 but we have not re­ceived any counter pro­pos­al.”

Ver­ti­Cast urged Flow to re­turn to ne­go­ti­a­tions in the let­ter, stat­ing, “It is our mis­sion to give foot­ball fans across the re­gion ac­cess to the Pre­mier League. To sat­is­fy this and im­me­di­ate­ly pro­vide ac­cess for Flow’s sub­scribers: Ver­ti­Cast re­mains will­ing to im­me­di­ate­ly meet with Flow to dis­cuss and agree on terms based on the val­ues stat­ed in FLOW’s email of Mon­day, Au­gust 1st”

McIn­tosh told the Busi­ness Guardian that tele­vi­sion re­mained a “vi­tal” part of the com­pa­ny’s vi­sion.

“We think that it is vi­tal that con­tent that’s the most watched con­tent is made avail­able to sub­scribers and we’re do­ing every­thing in our pow­er to do that. That’s why we’ve signed up al­most 30 ca­ble com­pa­nies al­ready.

“We still are try­ing as you can see from the let­ter that we sent out. You know it’s done in a way to just clar­i­fy the facts of what has tak­en place. But most im­por­tant­ly, it’s done in a way to say let’s fig­ure this thing out to­geth­er. So that peo­ple, your sub­scribers aren’t frus­trat­ed,” said McIn­tosh in a phone in­ter­view.

He clar­i­fied that Ver­ti­cast’s state­ment was a di­rect re­sponse to Flow’s state­ment. No such state­ment was sent to Dig­i­cel, who al­so ad­vised cus­tomers that it would not have the EPL as part of the sub­scrip­tion.

When con­tact­ed Dig­i­cel said it sim­ply did not have the rights to show the league this sea­son.

But the re­luc­tance to re­turn to the ne­go­ti­at­ing ta­ble may have been ex­plained in Flow’s state­ment. In it the com­pa­ny not­ed the ris­ing cost of the Pre­mier League had prompt­ed the de­ci­sion to join forces with Dig­i­cel sim­ply to keep the op­tion of show­ing match­es back in 2019 af­ter ini­tal­ly se­cur­ing ex­clu­sive rights in 2015.

Flow said, “We love foot­ball and we love the Pre­mier League. That is why for the past six sea­sons we’ve made de­lib­er­ate ef­forts to bring the Pre­mier League to our re­gion. We launched the Flow Sports chan­nel in 2015 and brought all 380 match­es across all Flow Sports chan­nels. In 2019 we even part­nered with Dig­i­cel to launch the Rush chan­nels to guar­an­tee wider ac­cess to the Pre­mier League to our cus­tomers, in the face of ris­ing costs to car­ry the match­es.”

The cost of EPL rights has on­ly risen fur­ther since then. In fact, in­ter­na­tion­al TV rights stood at a com­bined tal­ly of $5.4 bil­lion, greater than the UK con­tract for the EPL of $5.1 bil­lion. It marked the first time in the league’s his­to­ry that the in­ter­na­tion­al con­tract stood above the do­mes­tic UK mar­ket.

The stance of Dig­i­cel and Flow may al­so be tied to Am­plia’s lim­it­ed cov­er­age of the na­tion­al mar­ket. Sev­er­al fans took to the provider’s page fol­low­ing the an­nounce­ment that it had the Pre­mier League avail­able on its ser­vice to ex­press frus­tra­tion that Am­plia was not avail­able in their area.
This left them with no op­tion but to seek out in­ter­net pack­ages that would al­low for the games to be streamed. In­ter­net pack­ages which would more than like­ly be pro­vid­ed by Flow and Dig­i­cel.

The sce­nario was al­so mir­rored in oth­er is­lands where cov­er­age is pro­vid­ed by the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions gi­ants. In Ja­maica Flow and Dig­i­cel’s cov­er­age was wider than providers who had signed with Ver­ti­Cast.

Flow not­ed in their state­ment, “Re­gard­ing next sea­son, We will how­ev­er con­tin­ue to work to pro­vide our cus­tomers with the best broad­band ser­vices so they can stream Pre­mier Leagues games via Ver­ti­cast’s web­site and mo­bile app. “

The Ver­ti­cast App, McIn­tosh is ex­pect­ed to ar­rive in the next two weeks, but all of the Pre­mier League games so far had been streamed on their Csport.tv web­site.

“The roll­out of CSport has gone well, we’ve shown all 10 match­es even the four si­mul­ta­ne­ous match­es this week­end we’ll be do­ing the same when they have five si­mul­ta­ne­ous match­es. The in­ter­est­ing thing is that peo­ple have said they have been look­ing on their phones on their tele­vi­sions, on their lap­tops, on their Macs. So you know, the tech­ni­cal in­fra­struc­ture that we’ve set up in a very, very short time has proven to be suc­cess­ful,” he said.

How­ev­er, he was adamant that he still wished for the ca­ble providers to join the par­ty.

“That be­ing said, there is no short­age of our com­mit­ment to wide­ly dis­trib­uted which means work­ing with all ca­ble op­er­a­tors. And we’ve made our­selves avail­able to do that,” said McIn­tosh.