Why Manny V. Pangilinan is targeting GMA-7? The Truth Revealed

Why Manny V. Pangilinan is targeting GMA-7? The Truth Revealed

To understand why business tycoon Manuel V. Pangilinan is targeting TV network GMA-7 for acquisition, we have to go back in time.

In a classic leap of imagination, the Canadian media visionary Marshall McLuhan took a look at our digital future and predicted that the impact of mass communication technologies would be so pervasive that the "medium (will be) the message."

Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) Chairman Pangilinan (a.k.a. MVP) has got the future of his conglomerates all sorted out, including what fits where. In fact, he already knows where to slot in GMA-7 when he completes its buyout by December. They are now just talking how much and how many shares. Minor details for MVP. He’s got bigger things on his mind, and he gave his shareholders a peek into their future at their annual meeting this year.

"The fact is," he said, "telcos (telecommunication companies) will become obsolete." Then he painted the future for them.

THE NEXT FRONTIER

"The future of that is uncertain," he continued. "We have to be something more than that. The next frontier lies in the media space."

MVP envisions a future where his companies supply not only the power people use to charge their phones, but also the network they use to go online, and the content they access into their devices. PLDT will be - as the song goes - here, there and everywhere.

"Social media will eventually merge with us and us with them," he said. And boldly going where no one has gone before, MVP said PLDT must "move firmly into the social media, social networking and Internet space before they move into ours and eat our lunch."

COMPETITIVE SPACE

Where does GMA-7 fit in this bold vision of the future?

"You need to understand why a telco needs to move into the media space," MVP told reporters at the sidelines. "Traditional media, television, radio, print, but also social media - Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube - these two spaces are converging."

"It is possible that the Googles of the world - I’m not saying it’s Google - the social networks could get into the telco space… for them to offer and deliver their own services."

"We’re seeing how [PLDT] margins are getting depressed by staying purely as a distribution company," MVP said. "Our shareholders don’t like to see that."

COMPELLING VISION

"Telcos have user-generated content but they also need the content of others," MVP said. "Your television content is not user-generated. Somebody else produces content: your tele-drama, your news, even your radio commentaries."

"We need to move into that space so that there is eventually some form of a combination between telco as a utility and social media as providing the sort of content that a telco needs to deliver," he said. "The whole industry will change."

RADICAL CHANGE

Three powerful communication technologies are radically reshaping the news, changing both its format and content, and morphing it unto a form and shape that he Canadian media visionary Marshall McLuhan foresaw decades ago but few of us thought we would see in our lifetime.

Very recently, a worldwide study showed that the digital medium has overtaken radio and print. Another international study last year found that more people got their news from the Internet than from television.

The driving forces of this communication revolution are the Internet and the social phenomenon it spawned, the social media, which transformed the way people transmit and consume the news.

MCLUHAN’S WORLD

In turn, the news itself has evolved in form and substance, making true the prediction of futurist visionary McLuhan that, in simple terms, "the medium is the message."

The way the social media and the Internet have transformed the news, in fact, has turned the new technological processes of transmitting the news into powerful tools of radical social and political change.

The new arsenal of revolutionary change now includes social networking as its most potent weapon, evident in the radical changes that transformed the Islamic world since the Arab Spring of 2011.

The social media replaced television news as the dominant tool of political change.

BOUNDARIES BLURRING

Today the confluence of technology and socio-political change is transforming even the news itself as commonly understood.

In the interactive world of the Internet and social media networks, the traditional boundaries between news and opinion have been obliterated, with netizens conveying news and opinion in an odd mixture of digital chatter.

In many cases, news is now only used as a medium for conveying the more important opinions that crisscross the digital universe hundreds of millions of times per second.

News has become the carrying medium of opinion in a sudden reversal of roles, with content in turn transforming the media that carry them.

This is the future that MVP sees and it animates him.

Source: Business World, Winston A. Marbella