As some of you may have figured out by now, I used to work for a company that is part of GMA Network – actually, its GMA New Media subsidiary. The curious thing about working at GMA, aside from bumping into Kuya Germs at the co-op and sharing an elevator with Annabelle Rama, was that people there took the network competition with rival ABS-CBN very seriously. In fact, I’d argue that it has become part of GMA’s corporate culture.

To fan the flames of competition further, GMA posts the TV ratings from the previous day each morning in the elevator lobby and the cafeteria entrance. That way, employees could check out just how well each of the network’s programs performed head-to-head against their ABS-CBN counterpart. “Ooh, look, Encantadia totally beat the shit out of Kampanerang Kuba last night.”

Even though I’m no longer part of the company – as a freelance writer though, I still contribute pieces occasionally for the network’s official news site – I still remain interested in the ratings war, logging on to PEP.ph occasionally to check the numbers.

I’ve also kept up with the nuances of the ratings game. For example, both TV networks claim to be no. 1, and oddly enough, there is truth to both their statements. GMA leads ABS-CBN in ratings in Mega Manila, which is very important to advertisers, because some 70% of the spending power of the whole country belongs to this area. This is why GMA has been much more profitable over the past few years than ABS. But in total nationwide ratings, the Kapamilya network has continued to pound the living crap out of the Kapuso channel.

So it was with great interest that I waited for the TV ratings for last Saturday’s opening game of the UAAP finals between Ateneo and FEU. It was an especially important sports event because it marked the first time a basketball game was broadcast by either of the giant TV networks; it was interesting to see how the game would do, ratings-wise, against the rival channel’s fare. In this case, it was GMA’s Saturday afternoon tearjerker Wish Ko Lang.

Well, the results came in… and it was an even bigger blowout than Ateneo’s game 1 demolition of FEU. In Mega Manila, which has been GMA’s bailiwick over the past several years, Wish Ko Lang almost doubled the UAAP’s rating, 6.7 to 3.4.

The UAAP didn’t have much luck either with national ratings, despite the fact that ABS has been absolutely dominant against GMA in this regard. The UAAP scored a 9.7 rating against Wish Ko Lang’s 16.7. I’m not sure, by the way, if the UAAP game was even broadcast in all regions; there are instances when the networks drop programming in certain areas if they feel the program wouldn’t do well in the provinces.

The top brass of the UAAP probably shouldn’t lose too much sleep over this. Given the miniscule reach of Studio 23, which usually airs the league’s games, this was probably one of the most-viewed games in UAAP history just by virtue of being broadcast over ABS-CBN.

But the real eye-opener during ABS-CBN’s broadcast of the UAAP was just how little hype and promotion the network giant put behind the game. The low rating, while affected by the boring blowout game (although the way things have gone this season, was that any surprise?), was probably a result of how little buildup there was about the broadcast – even Kapamilya Blockbuster movies receive more plugs. The broadcast felt like something the network was doing out of duty, something it wanted to get over and done with – the redheaded sports stepchild to the network’s usual showbiz and news offerings.

And in a way, that’s the case. To keep the broadcast rights for the UAAP, ABS-CBN Sports threw the channel 2 broadcast of the finals into the deal to beat out GMA and Solar Sports, both of which actually offered the league more money. ABS-CBN’s sports outfit couldn’t afford to lose the UAAP games, because it’s not just the top-rated program in the struggling Studio 23, but it also anchors the programming for their HD cable channels. It was something ABS-CBN were forced to do when it didn’t really want to, and it showed.