SPH MediaWorks

~ the eulogy ~

Singapore Press Holdings owned the newspapers. Mediacorp, then styled MediaCorp, owned the television. In 2000 the government let each one into the other's business, and SPH MediaWorks Ltd was incorporated on 8 June 2000 with fifty million Singapore dollars behind it to build a broadcaster from scratch. Lee Cheok Yew, a veteran of the local television industry, had been appointed chief executive on 31 March that year. Within months the company had poached actors and hired news journalists away from Channel NewsAsia, and by November it was sending its Chinese-language performers to train in Shanghai and Taipei.

The plan was two free-to-air channels and a declared ambition to take at least 30 percent of Singaporean viewers and half the television advertising market. The Chinese channel was Channel U. The English one was announced as TVWorks and launched as Channel i. The Singapore Broadcasting Authority issued the nationwide free-to-air license on 26 April 2001, barely a week before air date, and the signal had sat ready but unlicensed through early April. Channel U went live on 6 May 2001. By that October the company also had two radio stations, UFM 1003 and WKRZ 91.3, taken over from NTUC Media through a joint venture and rebranded.

The Chinese half worked. By November 2001 Singapore Press Holdings was citing figures that made Channel U the second most watched television channel in the country, and by May 2003 the two channels together were pulling 33.2 percent of the free-to-air audience. SPH MediaWorks won Broadcaster of the Year at the 2002 Asian Television Awards and Channel U took Channel of the Year at the same ceremony. The English half never found viewers. Channel i's news show took Best News Programme in December 2003 and its ratings stayed where they had always been.

~ the dossier ~

~ the launch ~

Launch night is worth recording because it set the tone. Channel U opened on 6 May 2001 after a long publicity campaign called The MediaWorks Big Tune-In, which paid viewers cash prizes for being able to receive the service, and an estimated 95 percent of Singaporean households could. The first night pulled 12 percent and the second pulled 4.7. The incumbent Channel 8's main news scored 16.3 percent that week against Channel U's 3.9. Channel 8's vice president Khiew Voon Khang said the ratings slide looked more like a street bump than Mount Everest.

~ the ratings war ~

The competition was real while it lasted. SPH MediaWorks signed a content agreement with Hong Kong's TVB from June 2002, the month the incumbent's TVB contract expired, which gave Channel U first run on new dramas from the biggest Chinese-language producer in the region. Mediacorp responded by not renewing with TVB at all and filling Channel 8 with local production instead. A second deal brought in Taiwan's China Television. By May 2003 the challenger's ratings were rising and the incumbent's were falling.

Everything above happened in a country of about four million people, which is why none of it is recognizable from where I was watching. Turkish television had gone the other way a decade earlier: the state monopoly broke in 1990 and the result was dozens of private channels fighting over the same living rooms, with new ones appearing every year. A market where a second broadcaster is a government decision and a national event, rather than somebody buying a transponder, is a shape I have no reference for.

~ the merger ~

On 17 September 2004, three years and four months after Channel U signed on, SPH announced it was divesting its television channels to Mediacorp. SPH would take 20 percent of a new holding company, Mediacorp TV Holdings, which would hold the incumbent's Channel 5 and Channel 8 alongside both MediaWorks channels and the TVMobile bus service. SPH would also take 40 percent of Mediacorp's free newspaper Today, while winding down its own competing free sheet Streats. The transaction completed on 31 December 2004. Channel U transferred that day and woke up on 1 January 2005 as a sister station to Channel 8. Channel i was shut down, with the reason given as simple non-viability in a free-to-air market that small.

Two dozen or so of the company's artistes transferred to Mediacorp with the channels. Jeanette Aw and Michelle Chong had already gone there before the merger. The staff had been cut once before, 73 people in 2001, after a restructuring at the English channel and a weak advertising market.

~ what came after ~

Channel U is still broadcasting, which makes this a grave for a company and a channel rather than for a whole experiment. Lee Cheok Yew had resigned as chief executive on 1 April 2003 over what were reported as serious internal differences, and SPH bought out his and three colleagues' shares for 1.24 million dollars later that month to become sole owner. SPH finally sold its residual stakes in the merged entity to Mediacorp for eighteen million dollars on 29 September 2017, ending the arrangement entirely.

Not quite four years on air cost one company fifty million dollars up front and produced a channel that is still broadcasting twenty years later. Most television start-ups do considerably worse than that. It was still not enough to keep the company in existence.

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