It is now, four years after it happened, that I’ve finally made peace with what it means for one of the largest networks in the country to lose its franchise.

ABS-CBN has, and continues to have, a place very dear to my heart. And I can’t say I was totally blindsided by the events of May 5, 2020. Unknown to most, the seeds were sown long before Mayor Digong ever thought about running for President — and I watched it happen from inside two worlds that were about to collide.

How the ABS-CBN Franchise Fight Actually Started

Here’s something most retrospectives on the ABS-CBN shutdown get wrong: this didn’t start with Duterte.

The renewal process actually began under President Noynoy Aquino, all the way back in 2014. ABS-CBN hit some difficulty and withdrew the application — a decision that, in hindsight, I think was a grave strategic error. It left the network’s single most important legal asset unresolved right as the political weather was about to shift.

Everyone in the industry knew ABS-CBN was fearless in its reporting. It never pandered to politicians just to stay on their good side, and as a news outfit, I’ve always believed that comes with the territory. But somewhere in there, the powers-that-be started getting agitated. That’s where I trace the real seeds of the 2020 shutdown — years before it made headlines.

An Undeniable Loss, an Understandable Uproar

They were only waiting for the right moment. And when a sitting president started getting riled up too, the whispers intensified.

During Digong’s presidency, there were real efforts to patch the relationship between his administration and ABS-CBN. I was one of the people who tried to help make that happen. For a while, it looked like it was working — there was even talk of joint projects between the network and the administration’s anti-drug campaign.

That peace didn’t last. The president kept getting triggered, the whispers around him kept aggravating the situation, and eventually the inevitable happened: the franchise of the biggest network in the country simply wasn’t renewed.

I don’t think I’m overstating it when I say this was shocking. It was the first time a major Philippine network lost its franchise in such a sensational, public way — and it didn’t stay confined to Metro Manila. This was nationwide. All 53 regional ABS-CBN stations, TV and radio both, went dark along with the flagship. For millions of Filipinos, their only reliable source of news for decades simply signed off — permanently.

I remember the vigils outside the Quezon City headquarters. I remember how bad it got for the workers in Manila, and how much worse it was for the regional teams with even fewer options. The effect was undeniable. The uproar was completely understandable.

A Major Loss — and a Personal Stake I Don’t Shy Away From

I know a lot of my former colleagues carried real resentment toward me during this time. I’m a known Duterte supporter — I campaigned for him. Some went as far as to say that if I hadn’t helped him win, none of this would have happened.

What people forget is that I had stocks in ABS-CBN Corporation that went down with the network. ABS-CBN was part of my livelihood — I had clients I regularly recommended do business with the network, and I still maintain that relationship today. The shutdown was never something I wanted. I did everything I could to help patch the relationship: talking to congressmen, explaining ABS-CBN’s side, trying to buy the network some room to breathe. But the anger in that Congress was overwhelming, and Digong’s sway over it sealed the outcome.

The financial damage was brutal by any measure — ABS-CBN lost roughly 50% of its revenue when the franchise was revoked, a multi-billion-peso hit.

It took time, but eventually some of my former colleagues started talking to me again. I think they came to understand I never had the power to stop what happened. And I think some of them also came to see that ABS-CBN’s own leadership carried a share of the responsibility. There’s a balance every major broadcaster has to strike between fearless reporting and managing relationships with the people who control its legal survival — and ABS-CBN, in that window, didn’t strike it. The other networks whose franchises expired in the same period got renewed. That’s not nothing.

Why the ABS-CBN Shutdown Was Really a Forced Pivot to Content Creation

Here’s the part of this story I think gets buried under the politics — and it’s the part I actually find hopeful.

Even while I was still with the network, there were serious internal conversations about ABS-CBN’s business model. Back in the early 2000s, we already sensed the world was tilting toward content creation as the real game, not broadcast infrastructure. Content was always the actual business. We just needed to catch up to how the world was consuming it.

The pieces were already on the board. TFC (The Filipino Channel) had been serving Filipinos abroad for years. Star Cinema was a consistent profit center. And globally, the “Netflix model” — pay for direct access to content, skip the middleman — was fast becoming the default. The whole industry was mid-transition.

The shutdown, as devastating as it was, may have made ABS-CBN the first major Philippine corporation forced to go all-in on online, internet, and social-media-driven content distribution. Every other network treated “going digital” as testing the waters. For ABS-CBN, it became a matter of survival. My honest read: over the long run, the ad dollars were always heading online and away from traditional broadcast anyway. ABS-CBN just got there first, at gunpoint.

The Proof Is in the Numbers

The network is still adjusting, but I believe it’s already recouping what it lost — and here’s the receipts:

  • Rewind (2023), starring Marian Rivera and Dingdong Dantes, wasn’t just the biggest-grossing Filipino film of 2023 — at ₱1.2 billion, it became the highest-grossing Filipino film of all time.
  • Batang Quiapo keeps the Kapamilya Channel and TFC culturally relevant, and it’s not confined to ABS-CBN’s own platforms — it also airs on TV5 through a blocktime deal, where ABS-CBN essentially rents airtime from a former rival.
  • It’s Showtime, ABS-CBN’s longest-running noontime show, found a new home on GMA in 2024 — arguably the most unexpected crossover in Philippine broadcast history, and one that quietly ended the old rivalry between the two networks.

A Hard Road, But the Right Direction

I won’t pretend it’s all been smooth sailing. ABS-CBN is still working through real financial difficulties, and rebuilding from a 50% revenue hit doesn’t happen on a straight line. But the rules of the game changed, and I believe ABS-CBN is finding its footing as a network helping write the next set of rules. The shutdown was the end of an era — I won’t pretend otherwise, and I won’t pretend it didn’t cost people their livelihoods and cost me personally too. But I’ve come to see it as the start of a brighter one as well.

We can stay bitter and keep relitigating it. Or we can accept what happened and make the most of where things stand now. I know that’s easier said than done.

My heart still goes out to everyone affected by the shutdown. I remain genuinely hopeful that ABS-CBN will keep bouncing back, and keep doing what it’s always done best: serving the Filipino public.

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Nic Gabunada is a political and digital strategist who previously worked with ABS-CBN and served as social media campaign manager for Rodrigo Duterte’s 2016 presidential run.

People Ask Me About This a Lot

Why did ABS-CBN really lose its franchise? Honestly, it wasn’t just one thing. Congress declined to renew the franchise on May 5, 2020, but the roots go back further than that — to a withdrawn 2014 renewal application, and to years of friction between the network and the Duterte administration that never fully got resolved, no matter how hard some of us tried to patch it.

Did the shutdown really affect the whole country, or just Manila? The whole country. That’s what people outside the industry often don’t realize — all 53 regional TV and radio stations went dark, not just the Metro Manila headquarters. For a lot of communities, that was their only reliable news source, gone overnight.

Has ABS-CBN actually recovered? It is moving in the right direction.  And I think the numbers back me up. Rewind (2023) became the highest-grossing Filipino film of all time at ₱1.2 billion. Batang Quiapo is still culturally massive. And It’s Showtime moving to GMA in 2024 was the kind of crossover none of us would have predicted a few years ago. The network is writing a new playbook.

A note on all of this: what I’ve shared here is my personal, first-hand account. The full story of who bears responsibility for the shutdown is still genuinely contested, and I don’t claim this is the final word on it — just my side of it.