The Sinking of the Good Ship MVP

What is Manny Pangilinan doing?

Two (three?) years ago, the marketing campaign for many of the MVP-owned media centers was impressive. I couldn’t help but get excited for the many shows TV5 had on its broadcasting roster, thanks to the wide banners the station had placed in the Cubao terminal of the LRT 2. I still remember the ad for the Vic Sotto-led Who Wants to be a Millionaire? because you seldom saw Bosing wearing a suit.

And when I checked out the channel, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that most of the station’s shows were pretty good! I found the Tulfo brothers enjoyable, and the late night shows—the likes of My Darling Aswang—were hilarious.

But where is TV5 now? I don’t even know what they have going for them anymore. And with the advent of CNN Philippines come next year, that’s just going to be another competition for airtime. That won’t be good for TV5 and its ratings.

Thankfully, the station’s radio arm—Radyo5, for those of you who aren’t aware—is still going fairly strong, so long as you don’t listen to their beat reporters and broadcasters, who could use a little bit of training in reading teleprompters efficiently. But I can’t help but think that if MVP continues to cut funding to the station, even the radio arm’s quality might start to slip.

And then there’s PLDT and Smart / Sun. I use Smart’s mobile broadband service, and it’s been fairly decent for the most part. But when MVP launched the free Internet service for all subscribers, I’m lucky if I’m even able to connect to the Internet efficiently for five hours straight. As it is, I usually get a good signal for like fifteen minutes, then the network disconnects, and reconnects to paltry 2G speeds. Forget about sharing the Internet with other users.

And don’t even get me started with Maynilad Water. I have a whole series devoted to that, and I don’t think I’m even done with it.

I don’t know how Philex mining is going, but if what the stories I hear from friends in the industry is true, then it looks like MVP is slowly cutting the funding for many of his business ventures of the past decade.

Which only makes me wonder where this leaves us subscribers.