Infonet

~ the obituary ~

Most of what can still be established about this service's early years rests on one newspaper article from July 1985, printed in Singapore, about decoders. That is close to the whole evidentiary base for a national information service with a twenty-two year run. Worth stating at the top, because the usual distance on this site is geographic and this one is archival: a Malaysian broadcast service that never had a web edition left almost nothing behind that can be indexed, and what survives survives because a librarian in another country scanned a newspaper.

The service went on air on 2 June 1985, launched by TV3, Malaysia's first commercial television network. It was called Beriteks, a compound of the Malay word berita, meaning news, and teks, borrowed straight from English. The New Straits Times ran the editorial side in the first year, which made it a newspaper publishing onto a television signal. Later it was renamed Infonet, and ran in both Malay and English.

Within months the pages were also going out on RTM1 and RTM2, the state broadcaster's channels, under the same Beriteks name but with different content. RTM1 in its first year carried food prices along with listings for restaurants and shops, which tells you what a public broadcaster thought a household would type a page number for in 1985.

~ the case file ~

~ two networks, one service ~

The arrangement between the commercial network and the state broadcaster is the strange part. They were competitors carrying a shared teletext brand with separate pages inside it, and the understanding of the day was that teletext counted as a public service rather than a thing to compete over. Across the strait it reached further than intended: Singapore viewers who owned an SBCText decoder could tune in to Beriteks, because a teletext signal does not stop politely at a border.

~ the day it died ~

RTM stopped transmitting teletext around 2000, leaving TV3 as the only station in Malaysia still sending the pages. TV3's own sister channels never took it up. 8TV and TV9 arrived in a market that had already written the format off, and neither they nor NTV7 ever transmitted a page, so the entire national service narrowed down to one network's signal and stayed there for another eight years.

Infonet ceased operation on 1 January 2008. The consequence is unusually clean for a shutdown: from that date onward not one television station in Malaysia was transmitting teletext. A format arrives in a country on a particular day and leaves it on a particular day, and for Malaysia both of those days are on record.

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