Kenny DeFontes, who started out as a one-man household electrical service business in 1960, went on to build a broadcasting empire in Bermuda — but studiously avoided the public spotlight that could have come with a media career.

From an unassuming office in Hamilton, Mr DeFontes, who went into television and radio retail in the late 1960s, launched stations along with many notable broadcasting careers and personalities who became household names to the island’s listeners.

It began in 1981 with the VSB Radio-1450 country music station, and grew to four stations — while, in September 1990, VSB television took to the air.

That operation had a tough start. Two weeks after opening, lightning knocked out its transmitter until the next year.

Its launch also coincided with a punishing global recession, to which Bermuda was not immune.

In characteristic style, Mr Defontes said that “anyone who opens up a television station when I did needs their head examined”.

Other business ventures were less successful, but VSB Radio, which folded in 2017, set a high bar for local news programming.

The TV station also fought through a slump in advertising, streamlining its operations. VSB TV 11 kept going until August 2014.

Mr DeFontes enjoyed a long heyday through the 1980s, but was candid about the industry’s future in a 1993 interview with The Royal Gazette.

“There are too many radio and TV stations for the size of the island,” he said. “The only way we will survive is to operate more efficiently than the other operations.”

VSB radio and television both ultimately succumbed to the collapse of advertising revenues — a familiar refrain for the industry in Bermuda and abroad that became a free-fall with the rise of social media.

Mr DeFontes’s beginning servicing household electrical goods came with practical skills that would serve him well in broadcasting. He was able to fix equipment from the disc jockey’s board to the antenna at Fort Hill in Devonshire.

A proud moment came in April 1978, when Mr DeFontes opened his store in Hamilton at the site that became DeFontes Broadcasting headquarters.

In July 1984, when a strike took Bermuda Broadcasting Company off the air, VSB Radio enjoyed a spell as the island's only broadcast outlet.

Another of his ventures, the Scandal nightclub on Front Street in Hamilton, where Mr DeFontes was the majority shareholder, was closed by bailiffs in 1993.

It left such a bad taste in the broadcaster’s mouth that, when asked by the Gazette, he responded: “I will not talk about it.”

Another investment, the Warwick Hotel Company, where Mr DeFontes held a 50.6 per cent stake, struggled in the overheated property market of the 1990s.

Also in 1993, however, VSB signed an affiliate deal with NBC International, picking up the NBC News, a plethora of sports programmes and a variety of movies, documentaries and special interest programmes

Courtesy of Mr DeFontes and his team, Bermudian viewers and listeners received a range of their own programming, from cookery to news interviews and lifestyle features.

Mr DeFontes retired in 2014. He remained principal owner of VSB Television and VSB Radio after a move to sell the troubled companies went sour.

The radio side of the business limped along, buoyed by enough support from listeners to keep some of its offerings going through 2015. It finally went off the air two years later.

Mr DeFontes thanked a core group of management and staff for keeping “The Miracle on Reid Street” afloat for as long as it did.

Veteran VSB broadcaster, the late Bryan Darby, said: “The community should take this news as another wake-up call to the increasing difficulty that the print and broadcast media are having in remaining afloat in the face of the turn to advertising on social media.”

He added: “We did an awful lot of things that we are proud of, and we kept thinking we would turn the corner, but we never quite made it.”

Another of the broadcaster’s staff, Charles Webbe, paid tribute upon his retirement.

He said: “To say that Kenneth DeFontes is a private person is to put it mildly. But the truth is, he avoided the limelight.

“From his modest, windowless office on Reid Street, he ran the DeFontes Broadcasting Companies for 30 years and resisted the glitter and glamour that comes with television broadcasting.

“Kenny, or Mr D., as he was known, would readily admit to a love affair with television from the days of his childhood.”

He added: “Sir Kenny, Mr D., all of us here at DeFontes Broadcasting wish you well.”

• Kenneth Edward James DeFontes, an entrepreneur and businessman who became a mogul of broadcasting in Bermuda, was born on November 5, 1939. He died in July 2026, aged 86