Here’s some news that should be of interest to all local sports fans: Last week, MediaQuest, the PLDT subsidiary that controls TV5, signed a deal with IBC-13 to air sports programs in the government-controlled network. A new primetime block called AKTV featuring sporting events will soon air on the channel.

In exchange for block time, Media Quest will improve the signal of the channel and upgrade network facilities nationwide.

The move comes as the latest part of MediaQuest’s aggressive expansion strategy, which saw the company pouring in P7 billion into TV5 in 2010 alone. In October, the network launched an all-news FM radio station, while its 24-hour news channel Aksyon TV went on air on UHF television last February.

Sports seems to be the latest frontier for MediaQuest, which had already dabbled in covering live events on Aksyon TV such as the Philippines’ recent Davis Cup tie in Cebu and Filipino-American boxer Ana Julaton’s last fight in California. The deal with IBC-13 opens up more opportunities for the media company to air sports programming.

It also paves the way for TV5 to join the upcoming bidding for the broadcast rights for the Philippine Basketball Association. The PBA’s current broadcaster, Solar Sports, has indicated that it will no longer pursue an extension for its current deal with the league.

Solar also reformatted its VHF channel, instead buying block time to broadcast the games in Studio 23, a UHF channel owned by ABS-CBN, the network giant tagged as the odds-on favorite to win the PBA’s next broadcast deal. The PBA board itself had reservations about allowing the games to be broadcast over a UHF network, but was forced to agree because of a lack of options. This new development broadens the PBA’s choices.

It should be noted that PLDT chairman Manny Pangilinan is the foremost sports patron in the country, and in fact heads two companies that currently have franchises in the PBA: Talk N Text and Meralco. Pangilinan also bankrolls teams in the UAAP and the NCAA, as well as the country’s national programs in football, basketball, boxing and taekwondo.

Of course, the move of MediaQuest into the sports battlefield against ABS-CBN is just part of a larger media war; apart from setting up TV5 as a competitor to major networks ABS-CBN and GMA-7, MediaQuest is also positioning its direct-to-home satellite service provider Cignal TV as a competitor to dominant cable provider SkyCable.

No matter your network affiliation, however, this development is good news for sports fans who would now enjoy more hours of sports programming with the advent of AKTV. It would fill the void left by Solar after it reformatted its free TV channel, which deprived viewers not just of the PBA, but other big-ticket sports events that the network used to broadcast.

It also opens the opportunity for bigger sports events such as the Olympics and the Asian Games to be aired on Filipino free TV. The licensing costs of the broadcast rights for these events have become prohibitive, which led to last year’s Asiad being completely off local television. In 2008, Solar was able to afford the cost to broadcast the Beijing Olympics by airing different Olympic events across its whole network of channels, allowing the company to sell more advertising to recoup its investment. In this day and age, it’s the only model that works for these events, and with TV5 owning multiple channels over which they could air sports, it’s a model that they could possibly execute.

Perhaps more than all these, having another sports channel on local free television would allow all of us to watch sports without having to hear that godawful Studio 23 NBA promo with that terrible rapping.