S'pore making its radio, television more competitive

S'pore making its radio, television more competitive

SINGAPORE (AFP): The government-owned Singapore Broadcasting Corp. (SBC) yesterday said it was reorganizing under a new holding company in a planned privatization to better compete against Malaysian and Indonesian broadcasters and cable television.

The Singapore International Media (SIM) group will operate four television channels, 10 domestic and three international radio stations -- mostly operating in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil -- and transmission and distribution services.

SIM chairman Cheong Choong Kong said the new companies formed would be able to operate with greater flexibility than the SBC, which ceases to exist from today.

"We want to make a quantum jump from where we are to join the ranks of the major broadcasting players in the region and the world," he said.

Cheong said SIM might expand into satellite television to spread the high costs of local television program production over a larger market as well as go into joint ventures with other broadcasters and hire more skilled personnel.

"The structure of the statutory board is not suited for that. For that, you need a private company," he said. The SBC is now incorporated as a government statutory authority.

Preparations

The reorganization of SBC, which traces its roots to 1935 when radio was introduced in this then British colony, comes amid final preparations to wire up Singapore for cable television services.

Singapore CableVision, a joint venture between U.S. cable operator Continental Cable Vision and three local companies, among them SIM, will start laying a cable television network costing S$500 million (US$330 million) next month.

Some 116,000 households are expected to be linked by cable and ready for transmissions on some 30 channels by the end of next year, Singapore CableVision officials said.

"We've targeted that by June 1998, we should have over 700,000 homes passed by cable with a target subscription rate of over 40 percent, five or six years from now," Daniel Goh, Singapore CableVision vice president, told the Business Times newspaper.

Although SIM will have a 30 percent stake in Singapore CableVision, its officials said they were worried by the impact cable would have on their television operations.

"If we go by the experience of other countries we can expect the viewership of the (existing) SBC channels to suffer. After all there are only so many hours in a day when one can view TV," said Moses Lee, SIM's deputy chairman.

But he said that SIM would give Singaporeans what they could not get from cable or broadcasters in Malaysia and Indonesia by concentrating on programs made in Singapore for Singaporeans.

SIM's subsidiaries are Television Corp. of Singapore which will own and manage two channels providing English, Chinese and Tamil mass entertainment programs, Television Twelve which will provide public service broadcasts and Radio Corp. which will manage radio stations.

Transmission and distribution services will be provided by another subsidiary, SIM Communications.