BROADCASTING is 100 years old in the Philippines this year.

Sometime in 1922, an American lady, known as Mrs. Redgrave, did a test broadcast from Nichols Field (what is now known as Villamor Air Base) with a 5-watt transmitter, arguably the very first radio transmission test in Asia. On the same year in the month of June, Henry Herman Sr., a Philippine-American War veteran and owner of the Electrical Supply Co., did test broadcasts from three stations to assess if it would be good for his business.

At the forefront of this milestone celebration is the UP Department of Broadcast Communication, the home of the foremost historian of Philippine broadcast history, Dr. Elizabeth Enriquez, and where I also teach part-time.

To contribute to this celebration, I invited to my Vibal Group Facebook show “Kasaysayan, Kaysaya” Ramon “Jun” Magsaysay Jr. for an interview with myself and Ma’am Betsy Enriquez. He is known to many as the only son of his namesake, President Ramon Magsaysay, and a former senator.

But just what has he got to do with the history of broadcasting in the Philippines?

After his defeat in his bid for a second term in Congress in the hands of his own cousin in 1969, and after the death of his threeyear-old son, Ramon 3rd, Jun Magsaysay shifted to the corporate world. He had a master’s degree in business administration from New York University. He became part of the biggest garments factory in the country, the Philippine American Embroideries, as vice president of the company under its new name, Gelmart Industries, from 1970 to 1975.

As told in the biographical book The Only Son, created and published by his son Paco during the first months of the pandemic in 2020, Jun wanted to get to the bottom of one of the company’s problems, rampant pilferage of the warehouse stock. So, he explored the best closed-circuit television system for the factory. In the process, he was introduced to a new technology — community antenna television (CATV).

Even today, the problem with the traditional terrestrial (earthbased) TV broadcasting (the one that needs a congressional franchise) is that mountains, even buildings, can block signals. This was very much a problem in the 1970s when there were not that many relay stations. You needed a community antenna placed in a high point in a mountain to get the signals of the Manila channels and relay them down to the other parts of the area via cables. At that time, the only CATV station was NuVue Cablevision in Baguio City, owned by Oscar Lopez of ABS-CBN.

After learning the ropes of the CATV business from the likes of engineer Jules Ventura, Jun was ready to embark on establishing his own cable TV system Colorview CATV in 1972 in the mountainous terrain of Olongapo, in his father’s home province, Zambales. To strengthen his enterprise, Jun partnered with the sole supplier of CATV systems equipment in the Philippines, Ross Swartley of Jerrold Electronics, who used to supply the Lopezes up until the seizure of ABS-CBN by the Marcos administration when martial law was declared the same year. In the midst of this political climate, Jun was able to expand his business to Subic in 1976 and Lucena City in 1977. Up until President Ferdinand Marcos issued Executive Order 1521, which gave Sining Makulay a 25-year exclusive franchise to construct, operate and maintain CATV. The company was owned by Marcos crony Roberto Benedicto who also owned the other major terrestrial channels Radio Philippines Network, Banahaw Broadcasting Corp. and Intercontinental Broadcasting Corp., as well as the Philippines Daily Express. According to Victor Avecilla, “Under the decree, Sining Makulay, Inc. was authorized to provide cable television service to households that were willing to subscribe to its two channels. Its programs consisted mainly of past and current Hollywood motion pictures, foreign news, and popular American TV programs. Being a pioneer industry, subscribers of Sining Makulay Inc. were limited to selected villages in the metropolis.” Not much to be enjoyed apparently.

But People Power was the new dawn for the industry as the various cable operators of the country campaigned to repeal the executive order.

In 1987, Jun led the newly founded Philippine Cable TV Association until 1994, shortly before he was elected senator of the Republic. With the restoration of the democratic space, he was able to resume his operations in Quezon province, and expand to Zambales, Pangasinan, Tarlac, Nueva Vizcaya and La Union. And from just relaying local channels, by the 1990s they would be able to include varied international channels. Jun Magsaysay became known as the “Father of Philippine Cable TV” and the legislator who passed the foundational information technology laws of our land.

And this is where he impacted a boy from Tarlac whose worldview expanded by being exposed to cable TV by the late 1990s. That boy was me. Forever grateful.