The new frontier

“Embrace uncertainty. Some of the most beautiful chapters in our lives won’t have a title until much later.” – Bob Goff

For many of us, ABS-CBN was a permanent fixture on the menu of our lives, and watching sports on it was akin to the newspaper that accompanied your morning cup of coffee. The network sports programming had evolved into an industry leader, an innovator in many ways. Outside of the PBA and world title fights here and there, this was where you watched your local and international sports. It had come a long way from the independent four-man news-gathering operation it started in late 1986, composed of Frank Evangelista, newcomer Alan Jao, cameraman Rey Teodoro, and this writer. All ABS-CBN Sports back then was daily sports news (sometimes bumped off from prime time on heavy news days) and a weekly magazine program, “Sportsweek.” That small unit was the only broadcast team to cover the 1989 Southeast Asian Games, and was hailed by SCOOP as its Broadcast Sports News Agency of the Year. It had since grown into the busiest sports event coverage unit in the country, where yours truly spent much of 24 years with the network – on and off – since 1986. How things change over time.

When TV was invented and the first cabinet-sized televisions were introduced, the screen was only about six to eight inches across, the picture pale and stuttering. There was no sound. It took a few minutes to turn on. After a while, it heated up the room considerably, and on occasion, smoke would emanate from the bulky tubes that hummed continuously while it was one. This was a fire hazard, since its prettifying outer shell was usually made of wood. And it weighed a ton; you needed four people to move it. But you were considered technologically superior simply for having one. There actually were a few televisions in Germany during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but they were simply conversation pieces that no one really knew how to use.

Here in the Philippines, Frank Abao would tell me stories about RPN 9’s historic coverage of the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Of course, this recollection was over a decade later, as I was still a college student filling my summers and discovering my passion for sports broadcasting. RPN gained a reputation for its pioneering live boxing coverages until the mid- to late 1990’s, when technology simply ran too far ahead of them. Since the 1986 EDSA uprising until that time, the government did not put any money into the seized assets residing in Broadcast City. I had first been there as a child, when my grandfather Jose Unson was helping his best friend and classmate Roberto Benedicto run the place. Live events coverage was rare, as satellite rentals were prohibitive unless you were the government. Luckily, Pres. Ferdinand Marcos enjoyed sports.

In the next decade, people generally got their sports fix canned. Weekly programs from the WWF and broadcasts of PBA games on PTV became the staple. Vintage Enterprises, the former PR arm of the PBA, fulfilled Bobong Velez’s dream of trailblazing a path to the zenith of Philippine sports broadcasting. There were still some challenges, such as buildings blocking the line of sight of terrestrial transmitters. Its rise coincided with the PBA’s ascent to dizzying ratings in 1989, followed by years of doldrums.

But if you wanted American sports like the NBA, NFL or Major League Baseball, you climbed  to the roof of your home at ungodly hours, prayed for a clear line of sight to Clark Airbase in Pampanga, and twiddled your antenna until you got a clear signal from the US military’s Far East Network. All this while fervently praying that there would be no rain – or worse – lightning. But you took your chances. It was the only way to see Michael Jordan and the Bulls without having to haggle for bootleg (and delayed) VHS tapes of games in Greenhills.

One of the next major milestone came in 1995. People’s Television used the Southeast Asian Games in Chiangmai, Thailand, as the testing ground for its coverage plan for the Atlanta Olympics the following year. For the first time, everything would be broadcast from the site. There would no longer be any studio set-up in the Philippines as a fallback. Whether live or taped as live, every event would be transmitted from Thailand. Luckily, the broadcast center was adjacent to the Philippine broadcasters’ hotel. And even if you missed the shuttle to your assigned venue, some enterprising tuktuk driver would fly you past security and risk getting shot just so you wouldn’t be late for a coverage.

So what happens to all the major sporting events that will need broadcast coverage when they resume? If they consider their contracts still live, they will stay on, living with whatever audience they can get online and through various available platforms. Perhaps some will seek new pacts with other networks. The rest will try to grow their own audiences in this brave new world of no free-to-air channel. Each will use the collective fan base of all its personalities’ social media and any available mainstream media to cross-promote their matches. It’s like the dawn of the new age in 1986 all over again, when dozens of newspapers surfaced or resurfaced, and those who successfully fought for market share survived. The big challenge will be to entice advertisers to migrate along with them. Of course, ad rates will not be the same, and the alternative would be to charge subscriptions.

For the audience, it will mean developing new viewing habits, particularly from 2 to 6 pm, the regular sports slot once the domain of the network. Luckily. Technology allows a window of opportunity for the deprived audience to follow to where the action is. The new old frontier is upon us. ABS-CBN has successfully navigated new frontiers before.