This week's media news (episode 4)

Welcome to "This week's media news". As the month of February had drawn to a close, I'm still concentrating on local TV stations.

On February 28, Bernama TV celebrated its 5th year of broadcasting. Bernama TV is operated by the local government-owned news agency BERNAMA. Bernama TV started off as the audio-visual division of Bernama on 1 September 1998. Bernama TV was inspired by various news agencies, including ITN of London and NDTV of India. It originally started by having two rented cameras, some cameramen, an editor and four journalists to send audiovisual news material to RTM.

Its first major prominence was when Bernama TV had the opportunity to be the partner for the 1998 APEC summit held in Kuala Lumpur with the first recorded interview with former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohammad. The 30-minute interview was later distributed to TV stations.

Bernama TV's first customer was Telekom Malaysia. Telekom Malaysia wants to offer news through the internet via its website with Bernama's then-established new audiovisual division without having its in-house news service as a lot of money is needed to make one. With the help of Bernama TV, they created Insight Malaysia which is a news programme. Jeffrey Ong, previously worked as a journalist with TV3 in the mid-1990s and also a sportsman, was one of the presenters in the programme.

Other customers of Bernama TV are Channel 9 (now owned by Media Prima and known as TV9 since 2006) with Liputan 9 news programme and Astro for general news. Bernama TV eventually started its own channel on 28 February 2008.
[Bernama TV's history details was taken from Jurnal Bernama Khas which was aired on 28.2.2013 at 9:30 pm and compiled by myself]

Moving on to TV Alhijrah. Today TV Alhijrah started broadcasting to Malacca and district of Jasin on 743.25 Mhz (UHF channel 55).

We're going on to the last part which is TV presentation.

RTM
This week TV2 has changed its ident and break bumper to the current logo design that I had said in the previous episode. The music featured in the ident and break bumper has become fully instrumental and different than the previous one which is sung. The break bumper has no such "kembali selepas ini" and "teruskan menonton" reminder stuff unlike in the previous look.

Media Prima
On February 23, TV3 stopped using programme name identification that appear with the LPF rating logo at the start and after each commercial break of the programme. Now TV3 uses the LPF rating logo instead.

Buletin Utama has changed its desk from being wooden made to a virtual one with the TV3 logo in the middle on February 18.

TV9 which has recently made its logo revision (as mentioned in the previous episode), made a rollercoaster ident which airs at the start and end of transmission. It features TV9's many programme blocks logos.

(Revised on March 8 and 9)