Paula Lin­do

The Caribbean equiv­a­lent to Net­flix is here! New­ly launched Over-the-Top (OTT) Plat­form, MAS2TV, de­liv­ers unique Caribbean con­tent to con­sumers on de­mand, with the tagline "Love Your Cul­ture." MAS2TV stands for Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, Art, So­ci­ety, and Sports Tele­vi­sion, and was de­vel­oped in or­der to high­light Caribbean film­mak­ers and the cre­ative in­dus­try.

An OTT plat­form us­es the In­ter­net to de­liv­er video and au­dio–like TV shows and film–with­out a ca­ble or di­rect-broad­cast satel­lite provider.MAS2TV VP Mar­ket­ing and Strat­e­gy, Ian M S Roy­er said it is an op­por­tu­ni­ty for Caribbean cre­atives to show­case their work and be paid for it. Any­one from the Caribbean and the di­as­po­ra is wel­come to sub­mit con­tent for con­sid­er­a­tion.

"We of­fer a pay-per-click sys­tem for fea­ture-length and long-for­mat films, so film­mak­ers get a re­port with how many clicks, and there's an agree­ment that we put in place be­fore we take the pro­gramme that says how much they would get," Roy­er said in a re­cent in­ter­view.

"We take all kinds of films, our on­ly qual­i­fi­er be­ing qual­i­ty, be­cause if we're charg­ing cus­tomers to pay by the month, it has to be of a cer­tain qual­i­ty. It is fi­nan­cial­ly fea­si­ble for the film­mak­ers to al­low us ac­cess to their con­tent, be­cause we want to do 15,000 sub­scrip­tions by the end of the year, and they get paid for every per­son who watch­es their show, so it adds up.

"We al­so want to ac­cess, digi­tise and run old­er films as there's a niche for it. If we get film of lo­cal plays, we would wel­come and run that, once they have the rights to the play so we don't get sued. We of­fer shorts and mu­sic videos free of charge to the cus­tomer, so there's no mon­ey to be made from that but there is a home for it."

An­oth­er im­por­tant is­sue is that of rep­re­sen­ta­tion of non-main­stream com­mu­ni­ties and peo­ple. "Mi­nor­i­ty groups will al­so be rep­re­sent­ed. We want every­body to see every­thing the Caribbean is. The MAS in MAS2TV was a play on 'mas', which is Car­ni­val, which was an in­spi­ra­tion; but (...) we're def­i­nite­ly go­ing along the lines of want­i­ng to give every­one an equal home. This might in­spire mi­nor­i­ty film­mak­ers to cre­ate more con­tent be­cause they now have a plat­form to show their work."

Roy­er said the project is at­tract­ing re­gion­al at­ten­tion as coun­tries such as Brazil and Puer­to Ri­co have ex­pressed in­ter­est in hav­ing their con­tent shown on the plat­form. "What we're dis­cov­er­ing is that a lot of oth­er small­er re­gions want ac­cess be­cause they don't have a place to show­case their con­tent ei­ther, so it seems to be a niche op­por­tu­ni­ty for this part of the world to have their own cat­a­logue of films that they can watch when they want to watch it."

Ad­ver­tis­ing for the plat­form is tak­ing place through so­cial me­dia and me­dia tours, as the project on­ly went live on Oc­to­ber 1. Roy­er said he hopes this will be a game chang­er with re­spect to Caribbean mo­nop­o­lies by the ca­ble com­pa­nies.

"We met with a few gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials across the Caribbean and they've all said the same thing: that there's a need to de­vel­op these in­dus­tries. For now we're not com­pet­ing, but what we would like to do, es­pe­cial­ly since a lot of the pre­mi­um chan­nels have been banned, is to go af­ter rights with­in the Caribbean of pop­u­lar shows and geo-block it for the Caribbean con­sumer."

Geo-block­ing would re­strict ac­cess to Caribbean users based on ge­o­graph­ic lo­ca­tion. "But right now we're about push­ing con­tent and al­low­ing con­sumers that ac­cess. It's about Caribbean peo­ple be­ing able to see our­selves on TV."

Lo­cal com­pa­nies and con­glom­er­ates will be en­cour­aged to ad­ver­tise on the plat­form, es­pe­cial­ly on the free con­tent on of­fer.

Roy­er al­so said con­sumers won't have to wor­ry about the usu­al stream­ing is­sues present in the Caribbean, as the plat­form was built by En­da­vo and is very ro­bust. He said this is es­pe­cial­ly im­por­tant "be­cause the plat­form can in­gest live ra­dio and live con­tent, so if some­one was hav­ing a fash­ion show, they could stream it and we would say peo­ple have to pay a cer­tain amount of mon­ey to sign on and watch. Our servers and tech­nol­o­gy are based in the US and are very strong with a lot of re­dun­dan­cy, so they won't crash if lots of peo­ple are us­ing it. So we're lim­it­ed on­ly by the in­put we get."

Roy­er said a main dri­ving force be­hind the plat­form was chief cre­ative of­fi­cer and ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent Di­anne Bis­soon, who has close to 15 years of TV In­dus­try ex­pe­ri­ence to bring to the ta­ble.The plat­form is avail­able on­line at www.mas2tv.com and on Ap­ple or An­droid de­vices and Roku Box­es.