“Our public service media play an important role to inform, educate, and connect Singaporeans,” added Mrs Teo.
“They provide trusted and timely sources of information to form a common basis for social discourse. They also reflect our multicultural fabric and way of life.”
Mrs Teo said that the government provides funding for the overall operations of public service media entitles, rather than individual programmes in order to allow them to “effectively adapt and innovate in the fast-changing media landscape”.
Responding to Mr Foo’s point on funding local programmes, she said MDDI has moved from solely tracking Mediacorp’s TV reach to a “broader reach metric across all Mediacorp’s platforms and social media platforms”.
This is because of the changing consumption habits of domestic audiences and also Mediacorp’s broader network strategy, she said.
“For example, Mediacorp’s TV reach dropped by about 10 per cent over the last decade or so, but unique video viewers on meWATCH has increased by about 80 per cent in the same period,” said Mrs Teo, reiterating that public satisfaction with the broadcaster has held steady during this time.
In a supplementary question, Mr Foo pointed out that the recent success of Mediacorp’s TV programmes, such as Emerald Hill – The Little Nyonya Story, which had garnered domestic views that overtook popular Korean dramas and will be premiering on Chinese streaming platform Tencent at the end of the year.
He also hailed the accolades received by local actors at the Golden Horse Awards in Taipei.
Mediacorp’s achievements show that the future is bright “contrary to what naysayers say”, said Mr Foo.
He asked if the government is prepared to give a “further boost”, and support Mediacorp in more collaborations with international platforms such as Netflix.
