GMA Network continues to bring recognition to the Philippines as GMA Senior Program Manager Nowell M. Cuanang becomes the first Filipino invited as Moderator at the International Public Television (INPUT) Conference in Calgary, Canada last month.
Cuanang, a two-time George Foster Peabody Award recipient, is at the helm of award-winning GMA and GMA News TV programs Ilustrado, Katipunan, and Reel Time.
INPUT is the world’s biggest and most prestigious public television conference that brings together public television program producers and broadcasters to discuss and challenge the boundaries of public television.
The four-day screening event this year, held from May 8 to 12, showcased 90 selections featuring dramas, documentaries, animation, cross-media platforms, virtual reality, and news and current affairs from 30 countries.
For the first time, two programs from the Philippines were screened in INPUT and both of these were from GMA Network: TAPE’s Eat Bulaga and GMA News TV’s Reel Time.
The country’s longest running noon time show, Eat Bulaga was presented under the session “Kill Bill: How Can We Adapt Asian Style Entertainment”. Meanwhile, Reel Time’s “Gagged (Busal)” episode was shown under the “Making Without Faking” session. A discussion followed after every program screening.
Prior to this, Cuanang, who was co-sponsored by Goethe Institut Manila, participated in INPUT’s rigorous selection process of hundreds of works from over 80 countries in February in Berlin, Germany.
“For us media practitioners, we need to engage in discourses on issues and developments that affect the broadcast industry. It’s critical that we connect with our colleagues from across the globe to learn from each other and INPUT provides that venue,” shares Cuanang.
The INPUT Conference became inspiration to many international television programs such as Survivor. During the 1997 INPUT in Nantes, France, the conference featured Expedition Robinson, a reality show produced by the Swedish Public Broadcasting network. This Swedish program eventually became the seed for Survivor, one of the most successful reality shows in television history.
Since 1977, INPUT has traveled the world and was hosted at Milan, Washington, Stockholm, Barcelona, Helsinki, and Tokyo. It was first introduced in the Philippines in 2013 by Goethe Institut Manila through Mini-INPUT, where GMA-7 was one of the co-sponsors.