NASSAU, BAHAMAS — The Broadcasting Corporation of The Bahamas is considering legal action after its broadcast of the 2022 Boxing Day Junkanoo Parade was reportedly blocked by its service provider for more than two hours.
BCB Executive Chairman Picewell Forbes said the “conscious and deliberate action” by Rev Cable Bahamas and its company Aliv to place a message redirecting viewers of The ZNS Network to their Channel 212 exposed much deeper conflicts regarding competition and business ethics.
“This move by Cable Bahamas occurred without any discussions or agreement with The Broadcasting Corporation of The Bahamas,” Forbes said.
“This is an anti-competitive approach that has negatively impacted the satisfaction of our contractual obligations with advertisers and sponsors. Our broadcast was blocked at 6pm and was blocked for more than an hour.”
He continued: “The Broadcasting Corporation of The Bahamas takes the view that competition is good for the industry and good for our country however, we condemn these actions that seek to deprive the public of the best Junkanoo presentation as done by The Broadcasting Corporation of The Bahamas.”
In his statement, Forbes advised the corporation will notify URCA; however, ZNS General Manager Andrew Burrows revealed the corporation is also seeking advice on further legal action.
Burrows said officials were shocked when the broadcast was blocked at 6pm because there had been no prior warning or discussions with the cable provider. He said there had been talks for a joint broadcast in September but Cable pulled out of that deal and there was no further discussion about the two entities both being invited to cover the event.
“ZNS was invited to cover the Boxing Day Junkanoo parade and the New Years’ parade by the Ministry of Youth, Sports, and Culture,” he said.
“Their concern was that our staff was wearing BTC branded clothing but they were really ZNS branded items that also had BTC logo as one of our sponsors.”
Burrows said: “The Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture didn’t subsidize the cost, when that happens we have to subsidize with advertising and this is where BTC came in.”
“It’s anti-competitive, the business ethics of what they did was called into question.”
Burrows said: “In blocking our channel, they were blocking legitimate advertising contracts that ZNS had with their advertisers and for two plus hours, people who paid to have their ad seen were not seen by this action. Someone will have to pay for that.”
He continued: “It’s a fundamental issue where you can have a company serve as both provider and competitor on the same network. When you do see it in the US generally those stations will provide public access programming but certainly the operations of what they do as a channel and what they do as a carrier never mix.
“Here you have a carrier also competing on the same bandwidth as everybody else and it calls into question when there are issues with our channel not being able to be seen, whether these are legitimate outages or technical issues, or as we saw last night they had the will and ability to interfere with our broadcast without a discussion. It’s a legitimate conflict, no question about it.”
Burrows added: “The silver lining in this is that action gave the viewing public a chance to see what they could actually do with Junkanoo and they were thoroughly unimpressed.”
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