Caribbean Premier Sports Limited (CPSL) had its official launch of the RUSH brand at the Clubhouse Brewery located at the Constant Spring Golf Club in St Andrew on Wednesday, October 11.

The event, hosting strategic partners including senior executives and representatives from Sportsmax, Digicel, Trend Media and Flow, set the stage for how CPSL plans to become the predominant sports broadcasting company in the Caribbean and the major sporting events it has secured to date, with much more to come.

Below is the full address of Michael Look Tong, general manager of CPSL:

Now watch this drive! 

I would like to welcome everyone here this evening. I would like to thank our chairperson Sruta and vice-chairman Gyorgy for being present and for their comments. As you would have heard Sruta and Gyorgy have been the key visionaries behind CPSL and I will discuss what CPSL is with you in a few minutes but I’m very grateful to them for their vision, leadership and counsel that they have provided. I’d like to welcome all the teams from Flow, Digicel, Sportsmax and Trend Media that have been able to join us this evening. Welcome to the regulatory bodies, clients and members of the media industry. Thank you all for attending and welcome to the RUSH experience.

I hope you have been enjoying our décor and you’ll notice that there’s quite a lot of purple in the RUSH brand, visual identity, logos etc .. which is actually quite deliberate. I don’t know how many of you would know that when you combine red and blue you get purple which I think is symbolic of the CPSL story and where we have come from. I’ll say no more on colours.

A dominant force 

CPSL is a media company that was established in 2019 between Digicel and Flow with a mandate at the time to acquire and to manage the broadcast rights for the Premier League in the Caribbean, which the company successfully executed under the direction of then general manager at the time, Dominic Beaubrun, who, unfortunately, was not able to attend this evening due to illness.

The mandate of the company was significantly expanded in 2022 with the goal of creating a media entity that would leverage the scale of its joint venture partners and develop content services that would be made available to the Caribbean through a multitude of means.

The transition to this new mandate did take a lot of development work and many months to put together primarily related to legal agreements and finance. I would like to thank the project team ‘Project Purple’ that spent a significant amount of time developing the governance, agreements and financing that allowed CPSL to expand and successfully operate. Thank You.

CPSL negotiates, acquires, distributes and sub licenses content that runs the gambit of premium sports as well as general entertainment. We produce our own content services channels of which we have three in the market at this time – one rebranded in January and two more channels that we have launched this year. Our channels are RUSH Sports, Rush Sports 2 and RUSH Prime.

At RUSH Sports we align ourselves with global premium sports properties that people want.
We currently operate two 24/7 sports channels that provide premium sports to the Caribbean.

Top sports content 

Some of our signature properties includes the IPL, West Indies Cricket, English Cricket Board, UEFA Champions League, NFL, Concacaf 2026 World Cup Qualifiers and most recently the UEFA National Team competitions that includes Euro Qualifiers, EUROS 2024 Germany, UEFA Nations League and 2026 World Cup Qualifiers. For you football fans match day seven of the Euro Qualifiers begins and you can be treated to some delicious match ups on RUSH Sports and RUSH Sports 2 for your Heroes Weekend enjoyment.

All that is in itself a mouthful but the thing is that we’re doing more, which you will see and hear about in the coming weeks and months.

I can tell you that RUSH Sports at this time has five out of the top 10 global sports properties, based on 2022 revenues on its channels and we’re only in September. We continue to seek out and acquire the premium and most loved sports properties that are out there.

We will be at the table for all the major global sporting events like the World Cup 2026, Olympics in 2028 and others. We will work with all partners—free-to-air television, pay TV operators, OTT and streaming providers to magnify our assets and bring as much value as possible to the Caribbean.

Rush Prime is our 24/7 general entertainment offering that we launched this past July. Our programming on Rush Prime encompasses some of largest brands in media.

Favourite shows 

CBS is one of our key partners which I’m sure is not unfamiliar to any of you. Our CBS portfolio includes such staples as 60 minutes, The Talk, Late Night with Stephen Colbert, Survivor, NCIS, CSI, CBS Sunday Morning, CBS Evening News and more.

We are the only media partner of the WWE in the Caribbean where Rush Prime is home of all WWE weekly LIVE shows that includes RAW, NXT and Smackdown. Additionally, RUSH Prime has all the monthly premium live events of the WWE with events that I’m sure many of you are familiar with like WrestleMania, Summer Slam and Money to name a few.

Your favorite game shows are also part of our portfolio on RUSH Prime which includes favorites like Family Feud, Celebrity Family Feud, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. Yes, I said Jeopardy which has an incredible fan base that watch this show religiously from Monday to Friday.

We air the date and date episodes of Jeopardy and hear it vociferously from fans if that does not happen.

We’re not done, there is also the Hallmark portfolio that is integral part of the RUSH Prime line up. We will never underestimate the size and influence of our women! We are very proud that we provide a minimum of eight hours weekly of Hallmark movies. On partnership with Hallmark is integral for us reaching and engaging women.

Digital platforms 

As of today, all of our linear channels are already available to 80 per cent of all pay-tv households in the Caribbean which not only includes the Flow and Digicel platforms, but also on other operators around the region with more coming on board. On digital, the channels are on our partner platforms which are the Sportsmax App and the Flow Sports App. These apps collectively represent the largest monthly active users of any indigenous entertainment apps in the English-speaking Caribbean on a combined basis.

As you see there is really no difficulty in accessing our RUSH services whether you are at home or on the go. We have just got going and our goal is to get to 100 of all pay TV households and support are partners to grow their digital distribution.

CPSL has invested in great international content which is being well received in all markets where we operate. We have licensing agreements in place for all our content and we own the rights for all the content we distribute.

‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ 

Unfortunately there is significant leakage of TV content in the Caribbean….in Jamaica that is a scourge on the media industry.

Piracy is an issue that plagues all of us that are in this business and really needs a collective effort by content providers, right holders, distributors, regulators, internet providers and the general public for it to be curtailed……which it can be.

Globally content piracy accounts for UA$70 billion dollars (conservatively) in revenue. This is revenue that is not going into the hands of licensed media operators and rights owners but by who knows what type of enterprise? Let’s think about that for moment UA$70 billion dollars and what that translates into for media companies.

The fact is that Android boxes that we see widely distributed with 500 or 1000 channels for say $1,000.00 a month in Jamaica with every conceivable channel for sports and entertainment available is devasting the media business. Ladies and gentlemen, the vast majority of the content contained on apps on these boxes and websites is pirated which people don’t like to hear but this is a major problem that will destroy our industry.

When you buy one of these boxes or get a link for a rogue website from a friend and watch a football game on Sky Sports or a Hollywood movie released yesterday, you are supporting illegality, albeit unknowingly to some.

Let’s take this example – Sky Sports does not operate in Jamaica. The football match you watch, Sky Sports has bought for consumption in the UK and not Jamaica.

Some bright but unscrupulous chaps have sold you a device and is illegally streaming content to you that they have stolen i.e. not paid for and are charging you a fee for or in some cases offering for free and making advertising revenue based on the web traffic they generate.

I was dumbfounded recently when an employee of the industry told me they gotAndroid box as a gift and was overjoyed that they were paying US$70.00 a year and getting over 500 channels. Interestingly they thought that because they were paying for the service through an online payment process that everything was perfectly legitimate. This is the mindset that, in part, makes piracy flourish that and needs to be corrected.

Many of the pirates operate from outside of Jamaica but there are those that operate here who are not only pirating the international content, but also the content from local channels.

So, why is this as issue as it seems everyone is doing it? Well, this is rampant theft and if left unchecked our media industry shrinks and we’re in the wild, wild west.

CPSL and other peers can continue to invest in media and content but if there’s no mechanism to combat and destroy the piracy environment, slowly but surely the legitimate media companies that contribute enormously to the economy through fees, taxes, technology and jobs are going to fall by the wayside.

It is imperative that we start to work collectively to combat piracy in a serious way.

CPSL will be taking steps through technology, legal resources, publicity to protect our investments but we cannot do this alone. We need all the stakeholders to come together and work on this issue as it is having a major effect on our businesses. Whether your revenues are from subscribers, advertising, production or licensing, you are not immune to piracy, the pirates are eating your food! We need to come together to address this problem.

Our RUSH channels provide a diverse and dynamic portfolio of content that is engaging to several target audiences. As I told you, we go from UEFA Champions League football to Hallmark Christmas movies to 60 Minutes investigative news. This is a fascinating audience that’s available to advertisers and we’re pleased to be working with Trend Media to manage and satisfy the needs of advertisers and you will hear from them shortly.

In addition to allowing advertisers to connect with audiences, we can offer clients the opportunity to engage with our media properties. Through our global partnership which provides experiences with teams, players, stadia, games, events, tickets etc. to build more value for clients.

Shortly, you will hear from another one of key partners Sportsmax, who provides broadcast services to us for RUSH Prime in their new state-of-art facility in downtown Kingston. I had pleasure of touring the new facility and studio and it is amazing. Nic, Ransford and other members of the team – welcome.

So what’s next for RUSH?

We are laser-focused on providing the most engaging and exciting sports and general entertainment properties around. We continue to build our distribution not only in Jamaica but around the Caribbean with operators, free-to-air and other platforms through our sub-licensing business.

We are striving to provide more value and unique opportunities to advertisers with our global properties over and above ad spots.

Our goal is to be the most sought-after media brand that delivers all that is premium.