xinmsn

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

~ the last words ~

There was a specific deal shape that every country got offered around the turn of the century: take the national broadcaster, take an american software brand, staple the two names together, and call the result the country's home page. Turkey got NTVMSNBC out of that template in 2000. Singapore got xinmsn ten years later, and it is the same idea with the letters rearranged.

MediaCorp is the singaporean state-owned broadcaster, which means it owns most of the television and most of the radio in a country of five million people. Microsoft had MSN Singapore, which was a localized version of a global portal and had roughly the personality you would expect from that. In march 2010 they folded both into one site. The name put xin, the mandarin word carrying the sense of new, in front of msn, so the branding was a small bilingual joke that also worked as a URL.

It was written in ASP.NET, it ran in english and simplified chinese, and registration was optional, which tells you it was a publication rather than a network. It carried local and world news with the weather stapled on, plus the listings for MediaCorp's channels. The thing that made people actually come back was catch-up television: you could watch the drama that had aired while you were at work, on a laptop, legally, without hunting for it on a forum.

Nothing about it reached me and there is no reason it should have. Singapore's media internet is a closed system built for a small market with a state broadcaster in the middle of it, and the parts of it in mandarin were never going to travel to Ankara anyway. What i can read from a distance is the deal structure, because Turkey ran the same experiment with a Turkish news channel and an american network, and that one lasted fourteen years.

~ the record ~

~ the shape of the deal ~

Both sides were solving a problem they could not solve alone. Microsoft had worldwide reach and no local newsroom, so its national MSN editions kept reading like translations of something written somewhere else. MediaCorp had the newsroom and the archive and no real idea how to build a web business around them. Splitting the work meant one site could be both credible about Singapore and competent at running a portal.

The catch is that this arrangement only makes sense while the portal is the entry point to the internet. The whole premise is that people arrive at a home page and then fan out. Once the phone puts a search box and a social feed on the first screen, the front door stops being a place and the broadcaster starts wondering why its video is sitting on somebody else's property.

~ what it was actually for ~

Look at what MediaCorp got out of it and the eventual divorce becomes obvious. xinmsn was where its television went after broadcast: catch-up episodes and live radio, plus an interactive drama where viewers voted on what happened next. That is a broadcaster's product with a portal wrapped around it. Microsoft was providing distribution and a brand, which is exactly the contribution that gets less valuable every year the audience learns to go straight to the source.

By 2014 MediaCorp had already built Toggle as its own streaming service. Once that existed, half of xinmsn was a duplicate of something the broadcaster already owned outright, and the half that was not a duplicate was a news aggregator Microsoft could run by itself anywhere.

~ the split ~

The end was announced as a mutual conclusion rather than a failure, and for once that framing looks accurate. The two companies reviewed the joint venture and decided they could each serve the audience better separately. Operations ceased on 1 april 2015. Video and television content moved to Toggle, the news and portal side went to a relaunched msn.com.sg, and visitors to the old address were pushed to whichever of the two matched what they had come for.

The domain never came back as anything. It answered as a redirect for years after the split and then stopped answering at all. There is no squatter on it, no parked-page advertising, nothing trading on the name. A portal built by two large companies for a single small country turns out to have no resale value to anybody once those two companies are done with it.

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