The television service provider known as Multi-Choice TV or MCTV is a MMDS or DVB-C wireless microwave based broadcast subscription television provider in the country of Barbados. They offer a variety of packages which can be considered as comparatively priced to similar providers throughout the world. The service began operating on December 14, 1987 under the name Subscription Television (STV), which had very few channels offered main channels were (CNN, ESPN, and Lifetime Television) with an occasional option of Pay Per View being offered for local special events and the occasional international PPV sports broadcast. In 1996 it was upgraded to include a new platform called Multi-Choice TV which was an analog wireless microwave broadcast offering many more channels (i.e. BBC, Canada's CBC, TBN, etc.) eventually maxing the bandwidth capacity and having lately to upgrade the service to a digital broadcast system, Multi-Choice TV have not fully converted all of its subscribers as yet. The system relies on line-of-sight propagation so total island wide coverage have proved to be a problem and the provider is looking into alternatives. A recent press release have indicated their interest in a partnership with the local telco LIME . From 1 September 2008 MCTV replaced the Travel Channel on 511 (part of the High Flyer package) by Setanta Sports.
Given that the service uses a Yagi antenna to receive the encrypted broadcast, which in turn is then decrypted by the provider's set top box. The provider now has the problem of signal theft by pirates using modified DVB-C compatible receivers and PCI cards with the most popular being the "Dreambox" manufactured in Germany to decode their signal which is based on Nagravision which is a conditional access control system developed by Kudelski . In order to prevent such activity in August, 2006 the Government of Barbados stiffened the local Barbadian copyright laws, in addition to a strengthening of the laws on cable TV piracy. The CBC provider is presently planning for further circumvention of the Dream boxes in 2009.
Multi-Choice TV also competes against the US-based direct broadcast satellite (DBS) service provider DirecTV in Barbados.
The service uses the NTSC television format.