Flow Trinidad has no­ti­fied its cus­tomers that it will be up­dat­ing its ca­ble tele­vi­sion line­up in light of re­cent­ly is­sued guide­lines by Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (TATT).

In a state­ment re­leased to cus­tomers yes­ter­day, the com­pa­ny con­firmed that it will be “re­fresh­ing its ca­ble bun­dle line­up” to com­ply with the au­thor­i­ty’s di­rec­tive while af­firm­ing its on­go­ing com­mit­ment to de­liv­er­ing a wide ar­ray of en­ter­tain­ment, in­for­ma­tion, and con­nec­tiv­i­ty to its sub­scribers.

Ac­cord­ing to Flow, some chan­nel pack­ages will see changes: cer­tain chan­nels will be dis­con­tin­ued, oth­ers will be added, and over­all, the se­lec­tion of con­tent will re­main ro­bust and ap­peal­ing. The com­pa­ny as­sured cus­tomers that they will con­tin­ue to have ac­cess to a broad mix of lo­cal, re­gion­al, and in­ter­na­tion­al movies, sports, and fam­i­ly en­ter­tain­ment.

Flow’s an­nounce­ment comes as a di­rect fol­low-up to TATT’s in­struc­tions ear­li­er this week that ca­ble TV op­er­a­tors in T&T must se­cure the rel­e­vant in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty (IP) rights be­fore con­tin­u­ing to car­ry cer­tain US free-to-air sta­tions. The sta­tions in ques­tion, ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX, must be reg­u­larised on a phased sched­ule start­ing De­cem­ber 30, 2025. FOX rights must be se­cured by that date, fol­lowed by NBC by April 30, 2026, ABC by Au­gust 31, 2026, and CBS by De­cem­ber 30, 2026.

Ca­ble providers who fail to ob­tain the req­ui­site broad­cast rights are re­quired to re­move those sta­tions from their line-ups; they may al­so choose to pre-emp­tive­ly re­move any sta­tion be­fore its as­signed dead­line.

TATT ex­plained that al­though talks have been on­go­ing with US agen­cies and the net­works over the years, au­tho­ri­sa­tion to broad­cast these chan­nels le­git­i­mate­ly has not yet been grant­ed, and con­tin­u­ing to car­ry them with­out valid IP rights would con­tra­vene US in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty law.

—An­drea Perez-Sobers