TV FREE CARIBE: Cable lands in Grenada

McCourt sees rebirth of free thinking

Boston Business Journal
January 30, 1989
By Linda Corman
Journal Staff

He’s not exactly television’s answer to Radio Free Europe, but with his 4-year old television station in Grenada, Boston cable systems czar David McCourt is plotting the renaissance of free thinking in the Caribbean. He’s also making money.

“We’re trying to get a station where people are stimulated to think on their own,” said McCourt 32, who, besides founding Discovery Television in Grenada, is president of Boston’s $50 million McCourt Cable Systems. “In emerging nations, there’s a need for good programming that’s not American. The best way to stimulate democracy is not to send US AID. It’s much better to use the media to educate people to learn what democracy is.”

And though McCourt supports democracy, he has no qualms about making money-he plans to make out handily. He’s already selling $500,000 worth of advertising annually to local and international businesses, and this year he expects to make a small profit for the first time-maybe $150,000 on his original 1.15 million investment. But that’s nothing compared to what he expects once he expands.

“The numbers become staggering,” said McCourt in his Boston office recently, radiating a Grenadian tan picked up on a recent trip. He anticipates that profits will be enormous once he expands his current station into a “super station” that will serve 3 million people in the southern Caribbean and send programming to East Africa and elsewhere in Latin America.

Intellectual interest

Discovery Television, which broadcasts from the former Cuban Embassy in Grenada, began with McCourt indulging an intellectual interest in communications said the effect of television on developing countries. He had mulled the idea of starting a Third World station ever since studying sociology at Georgetown University and British Social Policy at the University of London.

Grenada swam in focus as a promising candidate for a laboratory during the 1983 US invasion, and McCourt ultimately chose it as the site of his station. The island has no television station and was centrally located in the southern Caribbean, something that made it a good springboard for further expansion.

Four years ago, McCourt believes, there were less than 1000 televisions on the island, in the extreme south and north, where broadcasts could be picked up from Trinidad and Barbados. Some other sets, with VCRs, were used just to watch movies.

When McCourt found the station required far more money and time than he expected, he donated the limited-capacity equipment he had originally purchase and plunged into developing what he believes is the first private station in the Caribbean.

Little house on Grenada 

The station started off broad-casting only a few hours a day and buying all its programming from abroad. The first programs included cricket games from England and the Lone Ranger, Zorro, Donald Duck, the Flintstones and Little House on the Prairie from the United States.

Much of the first tow years were spent ironing out wrinkles in the system-repositioning equipment so that station’s signal would not be blocked by Grenada’s mountains or knocked down in hurricanes-and training staff.

Discovery’s staff of 22 includes one American, two Trinidadians and 19 Grenadians. Key to his theory of producing programming that would foster democracy in the Third World, McCourt had all of the station’s staff trained to handle all phases of production. Staffers were taught all aspects of putting together a news show-from uncovering a story and scripting to filming and on-air reporting.

Having trained staff members and solved many of the technical glitches, Discovery began broad-casting seven days a week, 14 hours a day, two years ago. In each of the last two years it has sold about $500,000 worth of advertising, which just about covered costs. Advertisers have included Nissan Motor Co., Lipton Tea, Wilkenson blades, Campbell soups and several companies.

Discovery is also producing a half dozen of its own shows. Besides news, the shows include, For Your Information, a weekly program that addresses local issues, and a series of specials on local islands A recent For Your Information featured the minister for public works discussing how island development was bringing about a garbage crisis on the island. The last in the series on local islands focused on Carriacou, which, although nearby, was as foreign to many Grenadians as the United States.

Besides its fledging staff and revenues, Discovery can now boast of being the talk of the island. Some 75,000 Grenadians now have televisions, say McCourt.

Meanwhile, the next steps toward a superstation, and beyond, are already underway.

By early summer, McCourt Expects a new $150,000 transmitter to be in place that will send Discovery broadcasts to Carriacou, Petit Martinique and several other islands- to approximately double the population it currently reaches.

Then, by the beginning of next year, a further expanded transmission system will be ready to reach some 3 million people throughout the southern Caribbean.

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