Philippine News and Entertainment

GMA-7 wants ?to get to bottom? of TV rate-rigging claims (Inquirer)

In a statement on Tuesday, GMA Network said it ?is equally interested? in finding the perpetrators of the reported ratings fraud.

?GMA is equally interested in getting to the bottom of this allegation. The network is determined to find out whether or not the ratings survey can indeed be tampered with,? it said.

ABS-CBN filed its civil case before the Quezon City Regional Trial Court on Friday against AGB Nielsen for damages and injunction, with an application for a temporary restraining order that would shut down the media research firm service and allow authorities to investigate the extent of the ratings breach.

ABS-CBN did not name ?the other network? involved in the alleged cheating in the ratings saying that its issue was with AGB Nielsen.

GMA, meanwhile, said the alleged informant of ABS-CBN ?must be referring to a station other than GMA Network in the case it filed against AGB Nielsen.?

?It does not make sense that the informant who claimed he was hired to locate and bribe metered households should do so in Bacolod, considering that no separate ratings data for Bacolod are being released by AGB yet,? GMA said.

It also expressed doubts over claims by ABS-CBN?s informant that he was able to locate 89 meter devices in Bacolod.

GMA said Bacolod would account for only about eight percent of the total urban TV households in the Visayas, according to computations based on the National Statistics Office (NSO) population figures and AC Nielsen figures from their 2000 Fact Book.

It said 89 meter devices would represent more than 22 percent of the total panel homes in the Visayas.

To also prove that it was not involved in the tampering, GMA said its ratings in the provinces — particularly in the Visayas and Mindanao — did not show any significant improvement since July 2007 when it started to subscribe to the ratings of AGB Nielsen.
?The programs of ABS-CBN mentioned by it as having been affected by the alleged tampering have experienced consistently high ratings in the Visayas. In contrast, their counterpart programs on GMA rated low based on data from AGB (Nielsen),? GMA said.

GMA observed that ?it is only in the Philippines that the ratings of programs on non-cable or free TV households exhibit a very different behavior from the cable households. Coincidentally, the Philippines is also the only country in the world where a competing free-to-air TV station also operates or controls the dominant cable company.?

Dominant cable television operator Central CATV Inc. or more popularly known as SkyCable is owned 66.5 percent by a Lopez-controlled holding firm SkyVision Corp. and 33.5 percent by the group of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT).

In turn, ABS-CBN owns 10.2 percent of SkyVision Corp.

GMA Network said it had been sending letters to AGB Nielsen, asking if there were indeed irregularities in the data gathering process, long before ABS-CBN?s complaint.

If ABS-CBN is truly the dominant network, this is not the kind of behavior that they should be exhibiting. Apparently, they are now too much in dire-straights they will try anything including discrediting the very organization they rely on their ratings from.

Shutting down AGB Neilsen is an ideal scenario for ABS-CBN in theory because they can claim anything they want such as being the #1 network, etc. without an independent body telling them otherwise.

Also it truly defies logic that the tampering was being done in Bacolod. ABS-CBN’s strategy is just to show one incident in Bacolod of all places to discredit the entire data collecting process of AGB nationwide (example: Mega Manila).

Bakit naman sila ganyan? Kahit hindi sila #1 sa Mega Manila, #1 naman sila sa Visayas at Mindanao. Hindi na ba sila kumikita? Mura naman ang bayad nila kay Angel Locsin diba? Ano na nga ba ang ginagawa ni Angel Locsin ngayon?