MediaCorp Teletext

» see mediacorp.sg as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Singapore Broadcasting Corporation switched on SBC Text on 1 August 1983, the first teletext service anywhere in Asia and only a few years behind the BBC's commercial launch of the format. The engineering was not a straight copy. The system was tuned so pages cycled two to four times faster than the British services it was based on, which for a technology whose entire user experience is waiting for the carousel to come back around was the only optimization that mattered.

It changed names twice without changing much else. SBC Text ran to 1993, INtv from 1993 to 2001, and MediaCorp Teletext from 2001 until the end. The pages were split across three broadcast channels by subject. Channel 5 took news along with entertainment and lifestyle. The classifieds and the vehicle pages sat on Channel 8, while Channel NewsAsia carried the business and financial data. From 1999 there was a web version too, running in parallel with the broadcast signal for its last fourteen years.

What made it specifically Singaporean was the data on it. Certificate of Entitlement results, which is the price of the permit you need before you may own a car, were a teletext page, and so were Electronic Road Pricing rates. Ministry announcements had their own pages, as did the 4D and Toto draws. Other countries put football scores and horoscopes on teletext, and Singapore did that too, but the pages people actually memorized the numbers for were the ones that told you what the state was charging this month.

The classifieds came off Channel 8 on 1 September 2012, which is the signal that the commercial argument had already gone. A year later, on 3 September 2013, MediaCorp announced that the service would close at the end of that month, citing declining usage. The pages stopped on 30 September 2013, three decades and two months after they started.

~ the record ~

~ the COE pages ~

Singapore's vehicle quota system runs on a bidding process, and the resulting COE premium moves enough month to month to be genuinely consequential for a household. Putting that number on a broadcast teletext page in the 1980s meant a family could check it on the television without buying a newspaper or making a phone call. For a policy instrument that works by price signal, broadcasting the price cheaply was arguably part of the instrument.

By 2013 the same figure was on the Land Transport Authority's website within minutes of the bid closing, on a phone, with the bidding history attached. The teletext page had been a good delivery mechanism for thirty years and then became the slowest one available.

~ first in Asia ~

Being first matters here more than it usually does, because 1983 Singapore was not an obvious place for it. Teletext was a European broadcast technology built around European character sets and European public broadcasters, and adapting it for a multilingual island with four official languages was work nobody else in the region had done. The speed engineering suggests the people who built it had used the British systems and found the wait intolerable. Asia caught up quickly afterwards and most of those services died in the same window, between roughly 2010 and 2016, killed by the same phones. Singapore's lasted 30 years, which is close to the full possible lifespan of the format.

~ twenty-seven days ~

Twenty-seven days of notice is not much for a service that had been running since 1983, and there was no countdown and no farewell page of the kind Ceefax got when it ended in Britain eleven months earlier. HardwareZone ran a short goodbye piece. The tone of the local coverage was mild surprise that it had still been on air.

That reaction is the honest measure of a teletext shutdown in 2013. The people who needed the COE number had moved to the LTA site years before, and the service was kept alive by broadcast inertia rather than by anyone using it. MediaCorp's stated reason was accurate and nobody disputed it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »