NTVMSNBC

» see ntvmsnbc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

An American cable news brand and a Turkish news channel put their names together with a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC standing behind the first half of it, and the result was the address a generation of Turkish readers typed when something happened. NTVMSNBC went online on 15 May 2000. The name was ungainly in any language and everyone learned it anyway.

NTV brought the newsroom and MSNBC brought the platform, which in 2000 meant something concrete rather than decorative. The about page, which is still online, says the interactive elements were built on Microsoft-based software written for MSNBC, and that technology updates on the American side would be carried across to the Turkish one. There was a search engine that let you look backwards through the archive by time period, which was not a normal feature for a news site in Turkey at the time. There were also section pages for weather and for the road, because a national news site in Turkey has to tell people whether the passes are open.

It worked for fourteen years and it was killed by ownership rather than by readers. Microsoft sold out of the MSNBC joint venture in 2012 and the American site was rebranded away from the MSNBC name that summer, which left the licensed use of it in Istanbul on a clock. In December 2014 the Turkish site became ntv.com.tr, rebuilt by Doğuş Media Group's digital team with mobile traffic in mind, and the announcement said what these announcements always say: nothing about our editorial approach changes.

~ the case file ~

~ the bandwidth problem ~

The best-aged sentence on that about page is in the section headed infrastructure. The primary problem of internet publishing, it says, is bandwidth. Everything after that follows: the site had to be built so the publication would put an optimal load on the pipes rather than the maximum one, with uptime and speed managed against a recovery time in emergencies.

I was reading Turkish news pages over dial-up in exactly those years, on a modem that had worked its way up from 14.4k to 56k, so I know what that constraint felt like from the other end of the phone line. A page was a decision about weight. You could tell which Turkish sites had thought about the reader's connection and which had not, and this was one of the ones that had. That is a strange thing to remember a news organization for, and it is also the reason the site felt fast when the country's other news pages did not.

~ what stayed up ~

The archive holds full pages from ntvmsnbc.com up to 11 December 2014, and small redirects from about the 16th onward, so the switch happened in that week and the trade press wrote it up on the 24th. The domain itself has not been abandoned. It resolves, and it has spent more than a decade pointing traffic at its successor.

The better survival is at arsiv.ntv.com.tr, which still serves the old NTVMSNBC pages under their original design in 2026. The about page is there in the present tense, promising that the site will stay in constant contact with the number one news site in the world. So is the search box, wired to search.msn.com.tr, which stopped being a search engine long before the brand did. Somebody at that company decided the archive was worth keeping addressable, and eleven years later it still is, which puts it ahead of most Turkish media of its generation.

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