JUST A few years ago, though, the broadcast networks were placing their bets on the Internet as the "new, new thing" for TV. Domingo admits, "Our efforts were initially focused on the Internet. But as we all know, the Internet has proven to be elusive in terms of revenue generation. And the situation even worsened with the dotcom crash."

Indeed, the shift to mobile and wireless communications is largely a reaction to the low Internet penetration rate in the country as compared to that of cell phones. From six million by the end of 2000, the number of cell phone subscribers has grown to close to 11 million sending an average of 100 to 120 million text messages a day. In contrast, Internet users barely reach three million.

With even the wireless application protocol (WAP) proving to be a flop, SMS has become the acknowledged "killer application" of digital mobile communications.

At GMA, plans to use SMS for interactive TV started as early as November 2000. In June last year, it launched the first SMS-interactivity to be experienced on Philippine television. Televiewers were allowed for the first time to interact real-time with the issue-based talk program "Debate" and entertainment talk show "Star Talk."

ABS-CBN actually began experimenting on putting content on SMS a year earlier, focusing first on the delivery of news and information sourced from its online site, abs-cbn.com, to WAP-enabled handsets. It was only last year that it started using the application for TV and other platforms, but the Lopez-owned media company nevertheless claims to be the first to roll out SMS use on television on a huge scale.

"The earlier shows just used a normal cell phone line to receive entries from viewers," says Gatela. "What we did was to get access numbers from the telcos since that's easier for them to recall. To join any promo on the shows, they send text to 2366. When you say 2366, it's associated with ABS-CBN."

Gatela says they saw the potential of SMS interactivity after they got a pretty good response when they tried it on two ABS-CBN shows. The first was with the noontime variety show MTB's ("Magandang Tanghali Bayan") "Calendar Girl" contest, where viewers were able to text in their favorite among the candidates. The second was with the youth-oriented afternoon drama "Tabing-Ilog," where they ran a poll among viewers to find out whether they approved of the impending wedding of one of the characters. These days, even news programs like the early evening "TV Patrol" ask viewers to text which among three topics they want a news report on.

To be sure, with the popularity of text messaging among the youth market, SMS-TV integration has revolved more around youth-oriented, entertainment-based services like chat and voting and eventually included gaming. For GMA, that bent is even deliberate since its news service is already embedded in Smart Communications' enhanced SMS-based services, Smart Zed, and is also available through INQ7 SMS, the mobile services of inq7.net, the consolidated news site of GMA and the newspaper Philippine Daily Inquirer.

"An information-based service entails pushing content to the cell phone. Ours is more a pull service since we actually interact and get feedback from the televiewers," Domingo says.

Practically all the shows of GMA, ABS-CBN, and its other channels, Studio 23 and ABS-CBN News Channel (ANC) on cable TV, now have texting components in them. GMA has even branded its service as iGMA (or interactive GMA) such that its keywords all start with "i," hence ivote (polls), isay (chat), iplay (games), and iwrite (feedback). Its access codes are 2344 for subscribers of Globe Telecom and 4627 for those of Smart.

SMS-based gaming has also become big, as shown by the huge success of "Game K N B? (Game Ka Na Ba?)," a 30-minute quiz show on ABS-CBN involving studio contestants and home-based "text partners" who try to match their respective six-letter combinations. A recently launched gaming contender is "Txters 5" at GMA that also allows home viewers to win fabulous prizes by sending their answers to a trivia question shown on TV.

One strength of text-based game shows like "Game K N B?" and "Txters 5" is that the software that actually runs the games has been developed in house. It used to be that programs were outsourced. Domingo says proudly that they have come to develop their own using Java as the programming language. "We want the technology to be proprietary to us so that we have full control over it," he says.