‘Pinoy Hoops’ staggering numbers

The final numbers on the viewership and reactions to the breakthrough Filipino documentary “Pinoy Hoops: A National Obsession” which aired internationally on the National Geographic Channel are in, and they are massive. In the period surveyed between Oct. 18 and Nov. 30, the three-part series on Philippine basketball registered a total of 12,769,273 online hits. This is a huge number when you consider that this represents only those who talked about it online, which is just a minority fraction of those who watched it here and abroad. And it is a gargantuan number considering the circumstances under which the program aired.

Fox International Channels and National Geographic territory head Jude Turcuato conceded that there was plenty of competition, considering the program was only airing on cable and at primetime (9 p.m.) when the toughest battle for viewers is waged. And yet, when the series premiered on Oct. 21, the attention it brought started a snowball, peaking at over 1.5 million online impressions, the bulk of which were on Twitter while the program was airing and immediately after. 

Episode 2, which revolved around the 2011 PBA Governors Cup Finals between Talk ‘N Text and Barangay Ginebra, leaped to two million hits online. Consider also that the initial broadcast was also being replayed and generating additional viewers. Episode 3, the episode that was broadcast on Nov. 4 was the monster, with 3.9 million hits. This was the human interest story on ordinary people who had built their lives around basketball, from photographer Tony Lu to retired Alaska Aces trainer Tom Urbano and transgender professional cheerleader “Sharon”.

When you consider that 97 percent of the discussion was on Twitter and about three percent on Facebook, the numbers become magnified. If you multiply the total number of comments, tweets and retweets for the survey period with the number of followers of everyone who tweeted, you get an idea of how many people heard about it on those timelines. Add to this the international audience which saw the documentaries, and it really becomes a trailblazing television event.

“We normally do a two-month online survey for all our projects to gauge viewer impact,” explains Sally Jo Bellosillo, president of Caelestis Production which partnered with this writer on the project. “For a production to get over 12 million views in a just month and a half is amazing.”

Going deeper into the numbers, 62 percent of online comments were neutral, and mostly announcements such as “Watching Pinoy Hoop on NatGeo” and the like. A solid 34 percent of comments were positive, also helped by the recognition of host Rafe Bartholomew, who had spent years in the country writing his best-selling book on Philippine basketball, “Pacific Rims”. Seventy-three percent of those who posted online comments were male, which is typical of the basketball audience in the Philippines, where roughly 30 percent of viewers are female.

Of all the online impressions, 85 percent emanated from the Philippines, six percent from the United States, one percent each from Brazil, Japan and Canada, and seven percent from other countries combined. Geographically, the program was broadcast out of Hong Kong and seen all over Asia, with comments coming from as far as Latin America, Europe and even parts of Africa. But even at one percent, the minority number for those other territories would reach roughly 130,000 each. Even the unannounced replays towards the end of November got about half a million online impressions from those who had not caught the premiere of each episode. Remember, those are merely online impressions, not viewership totals.

Even while the series was being produced, the basketball community responded strongly to the idea of the first international documentary about our nation’s passion. Everyone had a sense of how important this project was, and we received such generous cooperation from everyone we approached, especially the PBA and its member teams. The success of the project had generated such a groundswell of support in fact, that one female and one male member of the production team have tried to get similar projects independently, even going so far as to claim they created Pinoy Hoops. Unknown to the public, their first attempt at writing a script on their own was thrown out with the criticism that “obviously written by someone who doesn’t know basketball”. That attempt was made without this writer’s knowledge or consent.

While we are very proud of the fact that this was an all-Filipino production, we must go on the record once again to reiterate that Pinoy Hoops was this writer’s creation, and that Caelestis was behind the entire production process. Truth be told, this writer spent a full year negotiating the initial contract without anyone else being involved in the process, and Caelestis threw its considerable resources into the project for the next two and a half years, culminating with the October broadcasts. Anyone other than myself or Sally Bellosillo would be misrepresenting themselves by claiming otherwise, and they even had the audacity to attempt to do so while the final credits for the series were being produced. Well, as they say, success has a thousand fathers.

The bottom line is that we were blessed to have the openness, support and trust of the entire spectrum of those who love basketball in the Philippines. It would be only fair to announce out of gratitude that we are already on the drawing board for more than one basketball documentary project which we hope to complete between 2014 and 2015. 

The passion for basketball never ends.