TV channels Sint Maarten

Sint Maarten's television is that of a busy little binational island: half Dutch, half French, looking out at the Caribbean and at the United States at once - and served today by a homegrown thematic network.

How television came to Sint Maarten

Radio paved the way: the Voice of St. Maarten, the island's first station, had been on the air since December 1959 and was heard on neighbouring islands. Television reached the island in May 1963, when the first service began in the Philipsburg area, its signal caught from Puerto Rico by a relay station on Fort Willem hill - a site chosen after reception tests ruled out French Quarter. What began as a relay of neighbouring broadcasts grew into local production, and in the cable era the island built its own channel family. On 10 October 2010, Sint Maarten became a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands when the Netherlands Antilles were dissolved.

The island's viewing has long run on cable, with operators such as St. Maarten Cable TV carrying the local channels beside the American networks - and the French side of the island adding its own services to the mix.

The TVCARiB family

The TVCARiB network, based in Madame Estate in the island's Lower Prince's Quarter, splits its offer by audience: TVCARiB Gospel for faith programming, TVCARiB Cinema for films, TVCARiB Kids & Teens for the young and TVCARiB Latino for the island's large Spanish-speaking community. It is the island's own bundle - a local answer to the cable packages arriving from abroad, and a window through which the diaspora follows home.

The music voice

98.1 Pearl FM carries the island's music side - an English-language mix of Caribbean music and news from Philipsburg - and its video stream brings the radio voice of the capital onto the screen.

From the regattas of Simpson Bay to the carnival parades of Front Street, the island's channels follow a community that lives between two nations and several languages; carnival season and the annual Heineken Regatta in March are among the occasions that fill the local screens.