No More HBO and Cinemax!

When I came back to Jamaica from my New York vacation and turned on my television, I scrolled to my favorite movie stations, HBO and Cinemax, only to be greeted by the "rice grain" signals on my screen. What! I still can see the other channels quite well, so I know my cable is connected, maybe these two stations are just down at the moment. Two days later and still no HBO or Cinemax, this was serious! So I clicked over to the Logic One information channel and was greeted by this notice below.

Both HBO and Cinemax have been removed from the channel lineup as ordered by the Broadcasting Commission at the request of HBO Latin America! What? Why? How could the Broadcasting Commission order the removal of these well watched channels just like that, how could they?

This question was then answered in a notice from two of Kingston's biggest cable company, Logic One and Telstar. It seems HBO Latin America has ordered that our local cable companies cease and desist from broadcasting all HBO and Cinemax North America feed effective immediately. According to the notice HBO Latin America has claimed that it is in the advanced stages of preparing a channel for the Caribbean region, called HBO Caribbean. They have also assured the cable operators that the new channel will not be broadcast in Spanish of with Spanish sub-titles. The alternative proposed by by HBO Latin America for the Cinemax channel was in the form of movies produced by Warner Brothers. In other words, they are in the process of providing our cable operators with a watered down feed to broadcast to their subscribers.

No time-line was provided in the statement for the commence of these two new channels slated to replace the HBO and Cinemax that we were used to. So until then We will have to do well with the other movie channels in the lineup, that is if you don't have Flow. There has been no statement regarding Flow's channel lineup, so I assume Flow is unaffected by this action. (Update 09/09/09: I have been advised that Flow has removed the mention channels from their lineup too.)All this has raised a few questions: Why has HBO Latin America suddenly ordered a cease and desist? Are our cable providers not paying for the feed? Why does HBO Latin America want to give us a different (watered down) set of channels? Is it that they are giving us a substandard version to fit our budget? What will these new channels be like?

Whatever the reason is, one thing is for sure, it seems there will no longer be and HBO and Cinemax as we know it for these two cable operators and their subscribers.