People who stream or rebroadcast Miss SVG will face action – CDC

This year, anyone who streams or rebroadcasts shows of the Carnival Development Corporation (CDC), especially the Miss St Vincent and the Grenadines pageant will face legal action.

This, following a decision by the CDC to not offer pay per view packages on mainland St Vincent nor Internet streaming to locals in an effort to improve gate receipts.

“I will just like to say that streaming of another person’s event without their express permission is illegal; it is against the law and the CDC will this year be policing it and we will be following it with the fullest extent of the law,” Chairman of the CDC Ricardo “Ricky” Adams told reporters on Tuesday .

Adams said there are people who, every year, take it upon themselves to rebroadcast CDC shows via Facebook and therefore rob the CDC of revenue.

He added that there are also people who buy a pay per view package and invite friends to their homes to watch the show, while there are also bars that broadcast the show.

“I don’t know if everybody is aware, but Facebook is becoming a lot more stringent in relation to how they deal with people who use their services for illegal transactions.

“So therefore we are saying we have absolutely no problem with you buying your stream overseas and in fact we can’t stop you in New York City or Miami from having your parties over there because you can’t come to Victoria Park on that night anyway, but we are saying be very careful if you choose to restream or you choose to come to Victoria Park and stream without the express permission of the CDC, because we will be following it to the fullest extent of the law possible,” Adams said.

“One of the things that happens is that people will take their phones and rebroadcast it and send it back to their friends. People will come into Victoria Park and they will hold their phones up and they will stream etc,” said Adams who told reporters that the CDC noticed that since the introduction of live streaming and pay per view, gate receipts for the Miss SVG pageant have dropped.

He said the pay per view package was done in conjunction with FLOW and was introduced with the aim of getting the various shows to persons in the Grenadines or persons who were physically unable to come to the Victoria Park.

“We recognized after some level of review that on the year that the pay per view was introduced that there was a significant drop in the gate receipts at the Victoria Park and that we have not been able to recover that drop,” explained Adams.

“It is unfair to us to ask the young ladies and their sponsors and the members of the team to put on a show in which we are investing significant time and effort and to have people not come to the park, but sit down home and call 25 of their friends, pay FLOW for one pay per view pass and have parties at their home.

“There are bars that are doing this and people having Miss SVG parties,” said Adams.

He added, “what we doing is saying come and have your Miss SVG party at Victoria Park that is all that we are saying.”

Pay per view will however be offered in the Grenadines through FLOW while streaming from VC3 will be offered to viewers outside of SVG via the Internet.