In recent years, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (which consists now of all the previously mentioned countries) has given a certain political currency to the idea of Southeast Asia. As with religion, and so with political and economic systems, Southeast Asia contains a great variety. Broadly speaking, the Philippines and Thailand could be described as unstable capitalist democracies. Singapore and Malaysia as authoritarian governments with open markets, Burma as a military dictatorship, Indonesia as beginning a transition to democracy after a long period of military rule, Laos and Vietnam as socialist states. and Cambodia as "democratizing" and Brunei, the smallest state in Southeast Asia, as a constitutional monarchy.

     Television was established in the region with technology and, often, funding from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan has been implicated in the discourse of national identity of most of these nations. Beyond that, like their political histories, there is a great deal of diversity in the television industries of these nation-states.

History

     Thailand and the Philippines were the first nations in Southeast Asia to introduce television in the early 1950s. In Thailand, as in the rest of Southeast Asia, television was initially state owned and closely connected with the older state-owned public broadcast radio. Modeled on U.S. television and like the privately owned radio stations, television in the Philippines was established with private capital. Burma was the last of the Southeast Asian nations to get television. Its first station. government owned and Japanese funded, opened in 1980.

     In the Philippines, Santo Tomas University started experimental television broadcasts in 1950. In 1953, DZAQ-TV, established by the brother of then President Elpidio Quirino, started daily four-hour broadcasts. By the early 1960s (when Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia were just beginning television broadcast), there were six television stations in Manila, five of them owned by powerful political families that also had substantial interests in radio and print media. By the mid- 1960s, there were 16 television stations and an estimated peak audience of over 1 million in and around Manila. The first regional stations started in 1968, in Cebu, Bacolod, and Dagupan, owned by the Chronicle Broadcasting Network (CBN), which already owned a television station in Manila and several major radio stations and newspapers.

     No other Southeast Asian  nation  had  privately owned television stations at this stage.  In  contrast  to this flourishing industry, public broadcasting in the Philippines has a sad history. The Department of Public Information established the Public Broadcasting Service in 1962, but it lasted  for only about  a year before its facilities were handed over to a private operator.

     In 1972, President Marcos declared martial law, and all media, including television, came under strict control of the government-thus, for the first time, bringing Philippines television in line with state-controlled television in the rest of the region. Marcos's rivals, such as the Lopez family, which through CBN has huge interests in the broadcast media, were forced to divest their interests in the industry. Five television stations operated during the Marcos era (1972-86) and were owned by Marcos cronies-a pattern not dissimilar to privatized television in Suharto's "New Order" regime in Indonesia in the late 1980s.

     In Thailand, the establishment of television is even more directly caught up in the political conflict. Marshal Phibul Songkram became prime minister in 1948 after a military coup against the elected government. Both during his first period of rule (1938-44) and again in 1948-57. PhibuI severely restricted the freedom of the press and used the radio quite deliberately to bolster his personal image. In the midst of political turbulence, the state-owned television was established in 1955 with the help of the United States. The Broadcast Law of 1955 authorized the state as the only lawful owner of radio and television broadcast facilities. The military started its own channel soon after and used it in part to destabilize the Phibul government. Both of these stations, though owned by sections of the government and deeply politicized in their content, were funded through advertising revenue.

     By the end of the 1980s, there were five commercial channels whose ownership varied according to the role that the military was playing in politics at any particular time. After the military coup of 1991, all five were taken over by the military.

     Television broadcast started in Indonesia in 1962 and in the following year in neighboring Malaysia and Singapore. In all three, television was fully government owned and controlled and remained so until the 1980s. Through most of that period, state television's agenda was overtly that of nation building and supporting the authoritarian governments of these countries.

     In Indonesia, Televisi Republik Indonesia (TVRI) started broadcasting somewhat hastily in August 1962 in order to coincide with the start of the Asian Games in the capital, Jakarta. In 1965, the "Guided Democracy" of President Sukarno was overthrown by General Suharto, whose "New Order" remained in government until 1997.

     It was not until the 1970s that television started to grow rapidly in terms of quantity of programming and audience reach. TVRI began to establish regional stations around the country whose main function was relaying programs from the organization's headquarters in Jakarta. In 1976, Indonesia became the first nation in Southeast Asia (and the fourth in the world) to launch its own satellite, Palapa, followed in 1983 by the much more powerful Palapa Generation B.

     The television system that emerged in the shadow of the satellite was highly centralized, with very small amounts of regional programming in most areas. Even with the powerful satellite and with dozens of stations (some of these relay stations only), TVRI by its own estimates reached only about 35 percent of the far­ flung archipelago and about 65 percent of the population. In 1986, in the hope of improving this reach, the government legalized the use of parabola antennae (whose spread it had in any case been unable to control). By the end of the 1980s, several foreign public and commercial broadcasters (including major global operators National Broadcasting Company [NBC], Star, and Cable News Network [CNN]) were also broadcasting via Palapa and therefore available through much of Indonesia via small and affordable parabola antennas. By some accounts, Indonesia had the fastest take-up of these antennae in Asia. By the mid- 1980s, in Java and Sumatra, where the majority of the Indonesian population live, households connected to these (sometimes several hundred households sharing one antennae) could pick up between 6 and 20 foreign broadcasts.

     In 1963, while Malaysia and Singapore were still part of the Malaysian Federation, state-owned television was established, modeled in part on the British public service broadcaster. In neither case, however, would the national broadcaster gain the kind of autonomy from the government that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has had. In Indonesia, as in Malaysia and Singapore, television developed in the shadow of political turmoil (in Indonesia's case, a military coup and the massacre of hundreds of thousands of suspected Communists) and the anxiety of governments to protect themselves against opposition on the one hand and to protect the relatively new nation-states from fracturing along ethnic lines on the other.

     In Malaysia, a second national network was started in 1969. In 1970, a satellite communication Earth Station was built, giving Malaysia vastly expanded capacity for live telecasts of international events. In Singapore, two channels were introduced at the same time, Channel 5 with Malay- and English-language programming and Channel 8 with Mandarin and Tamil programming.

    While the Malaysian and Singapore broadcasts started about a year after the Indonesian one, television clearly grew much faster in these two countries than it did in Indonesia. However, through much of the 1970s, Indonesia was much less dependent on imported television programming than Malaysia or Singapore or indeed the much older television industries of the Philippines and Thailand. From around 1980, Singapore started producing more local programming, a trend that continued strongly into the 1990s.

    While television in the countries discussed so far had varied degrees of state involvement, even state-owned television was from the very beginning dependent on advertising for its revenue, although Indonesia experimented briefly and unsuccessfully with fully state­ funded television in the 1980s. Advertising revenue made state-monopoly television reasonably profitable in Indonesia, Malaysia, and especially Singapore, where television density quickly reached 100 percent of households. The economy grew rapidly, and every resident in the small island could be reached from a single station in the city-state.

     The tiny nation-state of Brunei, between Malaysia and Indonesia, was the only nation in Southeast Asia that had television (1975) before it got independence from its colonial ruler, Great Britain, in 1984. The princely protectorate of Brunei started television with massive state funding in 1975. While one of the last nations in this part of Southeast Asia to have its own television, it used state-of-the-art color technology from the start, making it the first Southeast Asian national broadcaster to use full color. Set up with large­-scale input from the BBC and generously funded by an oil-rich government, Brunei television has maintained its technological edge.

     Citizens of Brunei had been tuning into Malaysian television since the late 1960s, and by 1973 there were already 3,000 television sets, a substantial number in a population of under half a million. It has been suggested that the reason for setting up national television was in part to counter what the government saw as the increasing influence of Malaysian television, particularly significant in a nation that had no daily newspaper and that depended on broadcast for its political communication. While Malaysian television continues to saturate Brunei and while Brunei television content has been and remains dominated by imports, it also plays a highly significant role in government campaigns of various kinds and in the national political life of the country more generally.

     Of the formerly British colonized countries of Southeast Asia, Burma was the last to get television. Controlled by a military regime since 1962, the nation became increasingly isolationist through the following decades. In 1980, the Burmese government, with Japanese aid, started television broadcasting in the capital, Rangoon, and surrounding areas. The reach of the broadcaster was expanded rapidly through a network of relay stations. Unlike other latecomers to television in the region, Brunei some years earlier, and Laos in 1983, Burma did not opt for color transmission and continues to broadcast in black and white. A second station, controlled by the Ministry of Defense, started in the 1990s. Both stations are dedicated to promoting government policy, though both carry popular music and traditional Burmese drama.

     In the much more politically volatile parts of Southeast Asia, what in the colonial period was called French Indochina, Cambodia was the first to have television, which was established in 1966. There are similarities in the coming of television to Cambodia and Indonesia in that in both countries its establishment had much to do with the egos of authoritarian rulers: President Sukarno, the first president of independent Indonesia, and Norodom Sihanouk, the first king of in­ dependent Cambodia, who refused allow free elections or be bound by restrictions of a constitutional monarchy. Sihanouk was overthrown by Marshall Lon Nol in 1970 and was then replaced in 1975 by the mass­ murdering Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot.

     Cambodian state television broadcast for about four hours a day in its early years, and during the Lon Nol years this was made up largely of newsreels and documentaries donated by foreign missions. Pol Pot used radio for propaganda purposes, but infrastructure and human resources related to television were completely destroyed along with the educational, technological, and cultural infrastructure more generally.

     In 1979, a Vietnamese-backed regime replaced the Khmer Rouge. While the new Cambodian government was in control of capital Phnom Penh, a civil war continued that formally ended only in 1991. Radio­ Television Cambodia (RTC) was reestablished in 1983 and revived television broadcasts of a few hours a day three days a week. The broadcast hours were increased over the next few years, and by 1986 Cambodians in and around the capital could watch their national television every day. for about four to five hours. A few years later, Cambodia's first provincial station was opened. Both stations operated with minimal funding and old. low-quality production and broadcast technology.

     In Vietnam, the establishment of television was part of the war effort for both the Americans and the North Vietnamese. The U.S. government committed itself to expanding radio and television into every remote corner of Vietnam in the conviction that this would be a decisive factor in nation building in South Vietnam. In February 1966, two channels were created. broadcasting from Saigon, one assigned to the government of South Vietnam (referred to in some documents as THVN) and the other to the American armed forces (AFVN). Like the radio stations. the television facilities became targets of repeated attack by the North Vietnamese forces.

     In contemporary Vietnamese official history. the birth of television in Vietnam is associated with an experimental black-and-white television program on September 7. 1970, in Hanoi. A decision to establish a Television Film Studio under the General Information Department had been taken in 1968. In 1971, the studio was annexed to the Television Department as the backbone and a nucleus for the eventual development of national television. On both sides of divided Viet­ nam. television was established for political purposes by governments and in unified Vietnam remained under strict state control.

     Laos, with a modern history almost as traumatic as Cambodia's, began its national television about the same time as RTC was being revived in the early 1980s. After decades of civil war, the U.S.-backed regime collapsed in 1975. and the Lao People's Democratic Republic was established under the Lao People's Revolutionary Party. committed to Socialism. In 1982. an earth satellite station was set up with Soviet aid for the purpose of receiving broadcasts from Moscow. The following year. again with the help of the Soviet bloc. Lao National Television started broadcasting from the capital, Vientiane. Like Brunei, Laos bypassed black­ and-white television and went straight to color broadcasting. Unlike Brunei, however, Lao television was poorly resourced, and in a nation with mountainous terrain, high levels of poverty, and an undependable supply of electricity, it reached only a small section of the population in its early years and broadcast for only two or three hours a day.

Satellites, Global Television, and Privatization

     As indicated previously, with the exception of the Philippines, television developed in much of Southeast Asia not only under the aegis of governments but also with a clear focus on nation building. By the mid- 1980s, increasingly accessible new media technologies, particularly digitization and satellite broadcast. began to challenge the capacity of governments to police both the televisual national borders and individual citizens' consumption of audiovisual material. Video­ cassettes since the early 1980s and. later. VC-Ds and DVDs. easily smuggled in. broke the monopoly of governments over audiovisual entertainment. By the mid-1980s. communication satellites were broadcast in Western television programs across the world. In Southeast Asian cities and towns, increasingly cheaply available parabola antennae began to change the television landscape of most nations. The 1980s to mid-1990s was also a period of rapid economic growth, with the consequent rise in the number of television households throughout the region. Most of these nations have a variety of legal and illegal pay television, mostly under private ownership. However, viewers of pay television still constitute a very small part of the total audience in the region.

     While the majority of governments in the region still ban the use of parabola antennas for private households to get global broadcasts, these are legal in In­donesia, the Philippines. and Thailand. However, the job of policing these bans is very difficult. and most of the governments, apart from Burma. have sought other ways of simultaneously accommodating and competing with overseas programming by diversifying their own program offerings and in some cases increasing the amount of imported material in their own broad­ casts.

     A new move toward privatization of television in the region started with the establishment of TV3 in Malaysia in 1983. However, TV3, as well as two newer private channels that started in 1995 and 1997, respectively, are all owned by companies with close links to senior members of the government. Singapore has also made some gestures toward loosening the grip of the state on television. But by most accounts, the corporatization of the state broadcaster has not made the system any more democratic or open. More than in any other part of Southeast Asia, the audience in Malaysia and Singapore appears to be segmented along ethnic lines, with particular stations concentrating on broadcasts in particular languages.

     The most dramatic transformation to occur in the national television scene has been in Indonesia since the late 1980s. The first Indonesian private channel started in 1987. Four more started in the next five years, all with the capacity to broadcast nationally via the Palapa satellite. Four of the five private stations were owned by relatives and cronies of President Suharto. Since the fall of the Suharto government, five more stations have started broadcasting. The private stations have decimated the audience of TVRI in the cities. At the turn of the century, political transformation generally and shifts in ownership of private stations in part as a consequence of the political change have made Indonesia, along with the Philippines, the most diverse and free television system in Southeast Asia.

     In Thailand, all six of the terrestrial free-to-air networks remain state owned, though five are funded on a commercial basis, and the two most popular stations have been run by private companies since the early 1990s.

     In the rest of Southeast Asia, television remains under government control, though all nations now have additional services for capital cities, and most have some regional stations capable of production and broadcasting. Bunna is the only nation that has persisted with black-and-white television. It also broadcasts fewer imported programs than any of the other broadcasters and appears to be the most successful in limiting illegal parabolic antennas.

     Vietnam had the most dramatic growth in television in the region in the last decade of the 20th century. It has three national networks, five regional networks, and one local station, which broadcasts in the Khmer language. All are state owned. According to VTV's own figures, television ownership is at I set per 11 persons. However, some 20 percent of the population lives in areas not reached by any television signal. The government is therefore planning to move toward digital television and satellite and cable delivery in a bid to further expand coverage.

Conclusion

     Brunei (with 575 sets per 1,000) has the highest per capita television ownership in Southeast Asia and indeed one of the highest in the world; Bunna (with 7.5 per 1,000) has the lowest in the region. In the region as a whole, however, television is the most significant medium of entertainment. While print and, more recently, the Internet are more important as news media in a region where illiteracy is a problem in a number of countries, television is likely to remain politically significant for some time to come.

     While many of the nations in the region are persisting with some form of government control (however modified), states have effectively lost the monopoly they had up until the 1980s over the audiovisual consumption of their citizens. On the other hand, the nationalist panic over global television's colonization of Asia (exemplified by Star TV's aggressive move into China and India) has not come to fruition. Given the simultaneously globalizing and localizing capacity of television and digital technologies coming into the market, it is difficult to predict the direction of television in the region. As with the history of television in the region, its future, despite globalization of the media, is likely to be nationally specific.