Caribbean telecommunications company Digicel has signed a multi-year broadcasting partnership with North American basketball league the NBA.
The deal is effective from the 2015-16 NBA season and Oliver McIntosh, president and chief executive of Digicel’s specialist sports channel Digicel Sports Max, told the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper that it will run for five years.
Each season, Digicel SportsMax will deliver 48 live regular season games and up to eight play-off games to subscribers in more than 30 Caribbean territories. The sports channel will also offer fans programming including the highlights show NBA Action, content from league-owned platform NBA TV and select classic games. The partnership will include NBA broadcasts in Spanish on the CDN SportsMax channel in the Dominican Republic.
Digicel will also launch NBA.com/Caribbean – the first official NBA online destination for fans in the region offering localised editorial and video content. NBA.com/Caribbean will be the league’s 19th international web destination.
John Suranyi, chief executive of Digicel Play in the Caribbean, said: “This landmark new partnership with the NBA, coupled with our acquisition of SportsMax last year – further cements Digicel’s position as the home of top sporting content in the region – and marks a significant step in our evolution from a pure mobile operator to a total communications and entertainment provider.”
The territories included in the Digicel-NBA partnership are Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Bonaire, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Cuba, Curacao, Dominica, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Montserrat, St. Lucia, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Martin, St. Maarten, St. Vincent & The Grenadines, Surinam, Trinidad & Tobago, and Turks and Caicos.