Television in Singapore

Television in Singapore began on 15 February 1963. The public broadcaster, MediaCorp TV, has a monopoly on terrestrial television channels and is fully owned by government holding company Temasek Holdings. Local pay TV operators are StarHub TV and Singtel TV. The private ownership of satellite dishes is banned.

Singapore households also have a high rate of TV penetration.

At 6 p.m. on Tuesday, 15 February 1963, a pilot television broadcasting service began in Singapore with a broadcast that lasted 1 hour and 40 minutes. After the image of the state flag and the playing of the national anthem, Majulah Singapura, the Minister for Culture S. Rajaratnam became the first person to appear on Singapore TV, announcing that "Tonight might well mark the start of a social and cultural revolution in our lives." Following his speech, the first programme televised in Singapore was a 15-minute documentary produced by Television Singapura called TV Looks at Singapore. It was followed by two cartoons, a news report and newsreel, a comedy show and a local variety show.

At the time, it was estimated that only one in 58 persons in Singapore owned a TV set, and the pilot service offered only one hour of broadcasting per day on Channel 5 (now known as MediaCorp Channel 5). On 2 April 1963, President Yusof Ishak officially inaugurated the regular service of Television Singapura. It started off broadcasting from 7.15 pm to 11.15 pm everyday, showing programmes in Singapore's four official languages (English, Mandarin [including other Chinese dialects], Malay and Tamil). On 23 November 1963, a second channel, Channel 8 (now known as MediaCorp Channel 8) was inaugurated. It took over Chinese and Tamil programming, while English and Malay programming remained on Channel 5. Both channels aired during the brief time Singapore was a state of Malaysia from that year to 9 August 1965, airing together with today's Radio Televisyen Malaysia (TV Malaysia at that time) then from the Klang Valley and Kuala Lumpur areas. From that day of independence when then PM Lee Kwan Yew addressed Singaporeans on the inevitable independence both channels became the national TV stations and would later form the TV Division of Radio Television Singapore (RTS).

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