Mediacorp Archive Singapore's National Broadcast and Content Archive

History and Background

Mediacorp Pte. Ltd. is Singapore's state-owned media conglomerate and national public broadcaster, owned by Temasek Holdings, the investment arm of the Government of Singapore. Its broadcasting lineage traces to the British Malaya Broadcasting Corporation (BMBC), which received a broadcasting licence on 1 June 1936 and opened studios at Caldecott Hill in 1937. Over subsequent decades, the organisation passed through several institutional forms: the Malayan Broadcasting Corporation (1946), Radio Malaya (1948), Radio Singapore (1959), Radio and Television Singapore (RTS, 1965), Singapore Broadcasting Corporation (SBC, 1980), and then three successor entities after privatisation in 1994 — the Television Corporation of Singapore (TCS), Radio Corporation of Singapore (RCS), and Singapore Television Twelve (STV12). On 15 June 1999, these were reconstituted as the Media Corporation of Singapore, subsequently known as Mediacorp. As of 2022, Mediacorp employs over 3,000 staff.

Broadcast Archive and Content Holdings

The Mediacorp Archive encompasses decades of broadcast content accumulated since 1936, including radio recordings, television programmes, news footage, and other audiovisual materials in Singapore's four official languages: English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. The archive documents the entire history of broadcasting in Singapore, from early radio to the digital era. In recent years, Mediacorp has launched AI-assisted media archiving initiatives to digitise decades of broadcast history. The archive includes materials from predecessor institutions including SBC, TCS, and RCS, as well as contemporary digital productions.

Significance for Journalism and Media History

The Mediacorp Archive constitutes one of the most comprehensive repositories of broadcast journalism in Southeast Asia. It holds news bulletins, current affairs programmes, and documentary content spanning over eight decades of Singapore's media history, including coverage of Singapore's independence in 1965, major national events, and the evolution of the region's broadcasting landscape.

Access

The Mediacorp Archive is an internal corporate archive; public access to historical broadcast materials is limited. Some historical content is available through the National Library Board Singapore's resources and other institutional channels. Mediacorp's current productions are accessible via the meWATCH streaming platform.