Pavillion+ It’s Here! Television that makes you feel right back at home!

BY SIMONE J. SMITH

In the Caribbean, creatives are rarely taken seriously,

Being a creative in the Caribbean region is a tough space to navigate, despite the great strides that Caribbean creatives have made in the creative sphere. In general, the Caribbean does not shine a light on the creative arts. While artistic expression is enjoyed as a hobby, or as a source of entertainment, it is not considered a serious or viable career path.

Our culture has a habit of ignoring art’s present and potential contribution to society and the economy. Unfortunately, it’s often an uphill task to convince others that creative work is viable work, and not simply a fun pastime.

But all is far from lost, especially when we have imaginative minds that are focused on educating the public about the lucrative and beneficial possibilities within the creative sphere. This young man recognizes that creative work harnessed appropriately can serve to bolster the economies of Caribbean states and foster meaningful social development.

His name is Gian Franco, and he is a Los Angeles-based film producer from Trinidad and Tobago. He has worked at Microsoft, Amazon and consulted for Comcast and Liberty Media. Last year his film Venus as a Boy premiered at the Tribeca film festival won an audience award and was distributed on Hulu. As a producer from the Caribbean, and a champion for our home-grown content creators, it’s his mission to bring Caribbean voices to the world stage.

In 2020, he returned to Trinidad to develop a Caribbean-based TV franchise. What he found was limited infrastructure that stymied the incredible hotbed of Caribbean talent. He immediately set to work, collaborating with fellow creators to figure out a way to distribute and amplify the unique and wonderful stories and perspectives of Caribbean creative such as: Machel Montano’s Bazodee, Kingston Paradise and Green Days by the River.

He developed a streaming platform, Pavilion+.  Pavilion+ empowers and elevates our culture-makers both artistically and financially, allowing them to retain creative control and copyright while drawing the world to a centralized platform to immerse in our collective voices.

Starting at $4.99 a month, you can choose from the largest selection of exclusive Caribbean movies and TV shows. There are hundreds of hours of content, including never before seen shows from across the Caribbean islands and classic movies and TV shows that haven’t been available for years, all easily available On-Demand, all in one place. Movies and TV shows on the service feature people who: look like us, sound like us and share stories that reflect our experience exclusively from Caribbean creatives.

Now there is no longer a need to go to different platforms to find different titles from across the Caribbean. Watch anywhere anytime you want once you have an Internet connection.

Readers, you know me; I had to get the inside scoop on how this resourceful, and brilliant mind brought this project to fruition.

“I am from Trinidad and Tobago,” Gian begins. “At one year old I moved to London and at 14 years old I moved back to Trinidad.

It was always about stories for me. Stories about our culture. Do you remember the Desmond’s Simone?”

“I sure do,” I replied. Who could forget the series theme song “Don’t Scratch My Soca.” With 71 episodes, it remains Channel 4’s longest running sitcom in terms of the number of episodes produced.

“Well,” Gian continues, “In 1992, cable descended on the community in the Caribbean. We went from two channels to 60 channels. Things became a little more Americanized and began to shift a little more away from the culture.

In 1998, I had the opportunity to start working in the tech industry. The Internet was starting to rise, and I had the foresight. I did my undergraduate degree in Computer Science, and Management. I started a website called Sound Village, it was like the MTV of the Caribbean. That was an internal project for my company Cataphysic. It allowed me to start building relationships with the creative community.

I was asked to become part of Trinidad’s 2020 Plan. I realized that we had incredible resources in the Caribbean, and it struck me that brain drain was real.

At New York University, I did my MBA, and I was able to work at Microsoft, and Amazon, and really got into the technology field. I learned ways to leapfrog and help the Caribbean catch-up. I wanted to start the Warner Brothers of the Caribbean, and this gave birth to Pavillion Entertainment in 2014. I actually left Amazon to launch that business.

One of our first projects was the Caribbean version of Family Feud, but there was a lot that went into it. In North America, you get a ranking of all of the top shows that played the night before. This is important because advertisers will use this data to see if they want to advertise. This is only in the UK, Canada, and the U.S., not in the Caribbean. We didn’t have data to show that this was the number one show, and this stagnated it. There were limited resources to do this show. The economics became unmanageable, so we had to rethink the whole idea.

Industry development would have to be the way to go; it was about building an ecosystem. From 2016 to 2022, I have worked with content creations, I worked with Flow for two years, and so as a function of doing that, I met every creative working in the region.”

What Gian learned was that the biggest need was in distribution. He started tracking where the industry was, and where it was going.

“I saw that streaming was going to be the way, so I began meeting with creators, and now we have a massive catalogue that we can distribute to the globe. It feels good to know that we can pay the content creators for the work that they have done.”

One thing that I learned during my talk with Gian is that he is forward thinking. He has been working on this project for over 18 months, and I was curious as to how his mind worked.

“Working at Microsoft, you learn to create and move on. I had to get very comfortable working at a scale. My head is always three to five years in the future. For me, it is following through. I think about it and then I execute. What you see today, we were planning 18 months ago. It is like you are always living in the future.

This is one of the most amazing things that I have ever done. I have actually gone to people’s houses and got their content off their hard drives. My goal is to get Oliver at Large on Pavillion +. With a streaming platform, you always have to have new content to feed the beast.”

It was an incredible discussion, and it is nice to know that someone is seeking solutions and exploring possibilities that take us beyond where we are, to where we imagine is possible, by providing the platform for creative talent to flourish and ideas to blossom and bear fruit, that redound to the benefit of us all.

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