MOBTV

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

~ the obituary ~

MOBTV wanted a Singaporean identity card number before it would play anything. Not a credit card, not a country dropdown, an NRIC. That is the hardest border a streaming service can draw, because it does not care where your connection comes from or what you are willing to pay. Either the state has issued you a number or it has not.

The full name was MediaCorp Online Broadband Television and it started in august 2008. MediaCorp is Singapore's national broadcaster, which means it owns essentially all of the free-to-air television anyone in the country grew up on, and MOBTV was the first serious attempt to sell that library back to people over an internet connection instead of an antenna.

There were two subscription tiers. The MediaCorp Channels package carried the broadcaster's own output, Channel 5 in English and Channel 8 in Chinese alongside the Malay and Tamil channels, and it was sold internationally as well as at home, which made it a diaspora product as much as a domestic one. The Asian Channels package, with dramas and telemovies from around the region, stayed inside Singapore. There was also an anime section called AnimeTrix that launched with the service and was quietly killed later.

I have no personal history with any of this and cannot pretend otherwise. In 2008 I was in Ankara on TTNet and Singaporean television was not something the internet was going to deliver to me even if I had wanted it. This grave exists because the shape of the thing is interesting from a distance, not because I was near it.

~ the case file ~

~ the national broadcaster online ~

The thing that separates MOBTV from the hundreds of small video services that died in the same window is that it was not a startup competing for a library. It was the library. MediaCorp did not have to license anything from anyone, which in theory removes the single largest cost that killed most of the 2008 streaming wave.

What it could not remove was the territory. Almost every drama and telemovie MediaCorp made had already been sold into other markets under separate deals, so the catalog that could go online freely was the catalog nobody else had bought yet. Owning your own back catalog and being able to stream it worldwide are different things, and MOBTV is a clean demonstration of the gap.

~ from paid to free and then to nothing ~

On 30 march 2010 MediaCorp merged MOBTV into xinmsn, the joint venture it had just set up with Microsoft, and the paid model became a free ad-supported one. Podcast.sg and xin.sg got absorbed at the same time. This is where the NRIC requirement comes from: free video with rights that only cleared for Singapore needs a way to prove you are in Singapore, and an identity card number is the bluntest available proof.

From that point the MOBTV name was a component inside somebody else's portal rather than a service. The website people had subscribed to in 2008 was gone in everything but branding, and what continued under the name was a video library sitting behind a national ID check.

~ the set-top box outlived the website ~

The last piece to go was MOBTV Select, the version that ran on SingTel's mio TV boxes. It was discontinued on 7 january 2014 and that is the date the service ends, four years after the website part of it had already been dissolved into a portal.

Then xinmsn itself shut down on 1 april 2015, which means MediaCorp's online video operation died twice inside fifteen months under two different names. Toggle took over afterward and was renamed meWATCH in 2020. The pattern here is not failure so much as a broadcaster rebranding the same catalog every few years and letting the previous shell go dark without ceremony.

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