TV5 finally primed up for profitability

MANILA, Philippines — TV5 Network Inc. expects to finally put an end to years of bleeding, with its first profitable year under the Pangilinan group potentially happening this 2025.

MediaQuest Holdings Inc. president and chief executive officer told The STAR that the network is hopeful on achieving a turnaround in its financial performance this year.

“It’s not something that I can work on overnight. But we are targeting, hopefully, this year we hit positive EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization),” Basas said.

“So if we hit that, that’s the first time in the history of the organization,” she said.

Manuel V. Pangilinan-led media conglomerate MediaQuest, the holding company of TV5 and Cignal TV, acquired TV5 in 2009.

Basas said that TV5 has reduced its losses significantly.

“Actually, we’re going against the trends in the industry. I know the entire industry is suffering. We’re going in the opposite direction,” she said.

ABS-CBN Corp. incurred a net loss of P2.59 billion from January to September last year, while GMA Network Inc. posted a 43-percent drop in net income to P1.41 billion during the same nine-month period.

“Boss (Manuel V. Pangilinan) said, you know you’re not out of the woods yet, but at least I see that you’re headed in the right direction. So feedback like that means a lot because that means we’re doing the right things,” Basas said.

According to Basas, the group’s decision to shift TV5 into a full entertainment channel is now bearing fruit.

“TV5 we’re very excited. We switched TV5 into a pure entertainment network. I believe we did that in 2023. So 2024 was really a year of developing the pipeline. So this year, at least for the next two years, I have visibility to the pipeline already,” she said.

“The North Star is very clear, as opposed to the past, we didn’t know whether are we sports or are we entertainment. Now it’s very clear. RPTV is the sports channel that we’re trying to develop and TV5 is the entertainment channel,” she said.

MediaQuest and TV5 in February last year signed a content distribution, sales and marketing agreement with Cabangon-owned Nine Media Corp. in a deal that formalized the launch of a new free TV channel called RPTV.

With its focus on entertainment content, TV5, on the other hand, is currently building a lot of its backend capabilities, Basas said.

“As you know we’re quite late in focusing TV5 as an entertainment network so we’re developing our capabilities to build up talents. We’re now looking for young talents that we can hone and making sure that the programing of the TV network is good enough so that we can actually grow these talents overtime. It’s something like a laddering strategy so we can make big stars out of them,” she said.

Election windfall

With the upcoming midterm elections in May, spending for election-related advertisements could also provide a boost to the financial performance of media networks like TV5 this year.

“Historically, we tend to see a big bump in revenues and earnings for media companies during elections,” AP Securities research head Alfred Benjamin Garcia told The STAR.

However, Garcia said that with the recent rise of digital media and the consequent decline in traditional media, there has been a decline in spending on TV campaign ads.