Last week, fans of the Eng­lish Pre­mier League in the Caribbean may have been thrown off by the an­nounce­ment that tele­vi­sion rights to the most watched foot­ball league in the re­gion would be go­ing to Ver­ti­Cast Me­dia Group Ltd for the next three years.

Many would as­sume, that fans of the league would once again have to ad­just sub­scrip­tions as they had done when Flow ac­quired the rights in 2015 or when Dig­i­cel and Flow split the rights in 2018, es­pe­cial­ly with Ver­ti­Cast be­ing a new name in the ring.

How­ev­er, ac­cord­ing to Ver­ti­Cast pres­i­dent and CEO Oliv­er McIn­tosh, your pre­mi­um sub­scrip­tion may not be void just yet as the com­pa­ny is hop­ing to make the prod­uct as wide­ly avail­able as pos­si­ble.

“What our vi­sion is, is to dis­trib­ute and present that con­tent in ways that it hasn’t been done in pre­vi­ous times to a much wider au­di­ence. So by way of ex­am­ple, when I say that I mean that, you know, con­tent like the Pre­mier League and oth­er pre­mi­um con­tent like that has on­ly been avail­able to a small­er per­cent­age of the mar­ket, not the wide mar­ket, be­cause of how it was broad­cast,” said McIn­tosh, who ex­plained Ver­ti­Cast planned to spread the view­ing of the league across var­i­ous plat­forms.

He said, “Our vi­sion is to in­crease that view­er­ship by al­low­ing it to be broad­cast on a com­bi­na­tion of tra­di­tion­al me­dia. By broad­cast­ing on tra­di­tion­al me­dia that doesn’t re­quire any pre­mi­um ser­vice or pre­mi­um ac­cess as well as on pre­mi­um ser­vices. In ad­di­tion to that, you know, we are build­ing our own dig­i­tal me­dia of­fer­ing and our own ar­chi­tec­ture be­hind that. So the way that we will of­fer it to the pub­lic, We think will not on­ly dri­ve up­take in dig­i­tal me­dia, but al­so dri­ve the au­di­ence on dig­i­tal me­dia.”

This em­pha­sis on ex­pand­ing the avail­abil­i­ty of the prod­uct was key to their suc­cess­ful bid to se­cure the high­ly cov­et­ed rights.

In the re­lease which an­nounced Ver­ti­Cast as the new hold­ers of the rights, Paul Mol­nar, Pre­mier League chief me­dia of­fi­cer stat­ed, “We be­lieve Ver­ti­Cast is ide­al­ly suit­ed to show Pre­mier League match­es across the Caribbean and fans will ben­e­fit from Ver­ti­Cast’s broad dis­tri­b­u­tion plan across mul­ti­ple plat­forms. Ver­ti­Cast will help us to max­imise reach and view­er­ship and to fur­ther grow the Pre­mier League fan-base in the re­gion.”

The re­lease em­pha­sised that the new rights hold­er of the Pre­mier League has com­mit­ted to a broad­cast plan that al­lows max­i­mum reach to en­sure it re­mains the most watched and most fol­lowed.

McIn­tosh con­firmed pre­mi­um chan­nel sub­scrip­tions would re­main a part of the process as they worked to trans­form how con­tent is con­sumed with­in the re­gion.

“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,” he said.

He ad­mit­ted the re­gion pre­sent­ed a dif­fer­ent chal­lenge com­pared to some of the larg­er mar­kets, but he ex­pressed con­fi­dence that Ver­ti­Cast’s ap­proach could in­crease the po­ten­tial re­turns not just for the Pre­mier League, but al­so for his com­pa­ny.

“We have cer­tain dy­nam­ics here in the mar­ket that pre­cludes us from broad­cast­ing it or mak­ing re­turns on it like they do in the UK or in Eu­rope or the US, right? We don’t quite have the dis­tri­b­u­tion in­fra­struc­ture that they have there. We don’t quite have the econ­o­my that they have there. We don’t have the fa­nat­i­cal fan base that they have there. So, you know, we have fig­ured out ways that we think we could en­hance what’s cur­rent­ly be­ing done,” he said.

He ex­plained the ac­qui­si­tion of the Pre­mier League rights was just one part of the plan as Ver­ti­Cast plans to launch “a ver­ti­cal­ly in­te­grat­ed me­dia com­pa­ny that will in­cor­po­rate broad­cast across all me­dia plat­forms in­to mul­ti­ple mar­kets in the Caribbean.”

“With­in the me­dia in­dus­try as you know, every­thing is found­ed on strong con­tent. Ob­vi­ous­ly, the ways of dis­tri­b­u­tion have di­ver­si­fied and in­creased over time. But the first step is al­ways to make sure you have the right con­tent. The an­nounce­ment we made this week about the Pre­mier League rights is a step in the di­rec­tion for us to make sure that we first have the, you know, the most in-de­mand con­tent,” said McIn­tosh, who draws up­on two decades of ex­pe­ri­ence with­in the in­dus­try, hav­ing been a ma­jor part of the es­tab­lish­ment of  Sports­Max.

McIn­tosh is hope­ful Ver­ti­Cast will cre­ate “a re­gion­al me­dia en­ti­ty with the in­ten­tion to broad­cast­ing over tra­di­tion­al me­dia, ca­ble tele­vi­sion and dig­i­tal me­dia via stream­ing and mo­bile via part­ner­ships and on its own chan­nels.”

He said that of­ten me­dia with­in the Caribbean over­looked the po­ten­tial of me­dia in­te­gra­tion.

“I think for too many years, we have been look­ing at broad­casts in si­los. That is, you know, there is free to air and then sep­a­rate­ly there is pay TVs that’s ca­ble and then sep­a­rate­ly there is ra­dio and then sep­a­rate­ly there is dig­i­tal me­dia, right. And, as you said, a lot of the tra­di­tion­al me­dia or even the ca­ble me­dia has been re­luc­tant to get in­to the dig­i­tal me­dia. How am I go­ing to make a re­turn on that in iso­la­tion?” he said, “Our view is that you can’t do it in iso­la­tion. You have to treat it al­most as a con­ver­gence of me­dia, and how do you make one com­pli­ment the oth­er? And that is our ap­proach. Our ap­proach is that we’re not go­ing to op­er­ate in si­los. We’re go­ing to seek to have tra­di­tion­al me­dia ben­e­fit off of dig­i­tal me­dia, and vice ver­sa dig­i­tal me­dia ben­e­fit from tra­di­tion­al me­dia.”

Ver­ti­Cast is hop­ing to work with re­gion­al con­tent cre­ators with the aim of ex­pand­ing their reach as he recog­nised of­ten lacked the re­sources to push their prod­ucts fur­ther along.

“A ma­jor em­pha­sis of ours is go­ing to be to con­tin­ue work­ing with lo­cal pro­duc­ers, the IPPs (In­tel­lec­tu­al Prop­er­ty Pro­duc­ers) around the re­gion, and when I say work with them, it doesn’t mean you know, we say to you okay, come in and present your con­tent that will de­cide if we show it or not, or we’re go­ing to rent your air­time. A ma­jor em­pha­sis of ours is go­ing to be IPPs typ­i­cal­ly don’t have enough pro­duc­tion re­sources to re­al­ly com­plete their con­tent pack­ages,” he said.

This he said would en­sure that Ver­ti­Cast would not be sole­ly re­liant on in­ter­na­tion­al pro­gram­ming while al­so de­vel­op­ing con­tent with­in the re­gion.

“What we will do is we will work with a lot of the IPPs by pro­vid­ing them with cer­tain re­sources that they can then utilise to com­plete their pro­duc­tions and con­tent pack­ages. So that it be­comes a cer­tain qual­i­ty that then can be broad­cast on our plat­forms. So, so we will spend a lot of time work­ing to cu­rate lo­cal con­tent and help­ing pro­duc­ers to cu­rate lo­cal con­tent,” he said.

Ver­ti­Cast is aim­ing to serve con­tent to a mar­ket of near­ly 45 mil­lion peo­ple in over 26 coun­tries in­clud­ing the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, and parts of South Amer­i­ca. The mul­ti-plat­form com­pa­ny has re­port­ed­ly se­cured sup­port from ma­jor con­tent providers which the com­pa­ny will roll­out over the next cou­ple of weeks.