E-Television

E-Television is the holding company behind three new television channels available over the air in Lenapore: Excite, Emerald and Enjoy. These compete against Mediacorp's largest channels.

History

In August 2017, the Media Regulatory Authority issued two series of licenses for three channels to each of them. The first licenses were specialty news channels awarded to Lenapore Press Holdings. The second wave, announced in October, was an open contest.

Four companies had bid for the license. Associated-Rediffusion had a strong bid as it intended to return to the broadcasting market. Its main rivals were Hang Peng's TVB, a local holding made for the license called Fantastic Group and Lenapore TV Holdings. The purpose of the license was to prevent LPH from re-entering the entertainment market in order to prevent a shutdown similar to that of LPH MediaWorks less than a decade before.

Eventually the bid was awarded to Associated-Rediffusion and Fantastic Group, who were joined by local businessman Lee Yu Hong who bought half the shares. Fantastic stayed with 40% and A-R with the remaining 10%. This situation was similar to the bidding behind the first Lenaporean television channel sixty years prior. The name of the holding company, E-Television, was revealed on March 16, 2018, at its first public meeting in Lenapore City. In the coming weeks, auditions for potential future E-Television artistes were announced nationwide.

In June, the holding announced the names of the channels: Excite for the English channel, Entertain for the Mandarin one and Emerald for the Japanese one. The colors used for each channel were red for Excite, blue for Entertain and green for Emerald. The colors were selected in order to avoid direct conflict with those used by its prime competitors: Channel 5, Channel 8 and Sakura.

The channels launched in August 2018, initially available on StarHub and Lentel. The terrestrial service launched in February 2019 in time for the Kaizhungese New Year and ratings improved significantly. Of the three channels, only Excite was performing behind Channel 5, yet Entertain and Emerald respectively managed to surpass Channel 8 and Sakura respectively on most days. This is due to the topics the channels touched and that Mediacorp was not interested in, but later decided to diversify its topics as a countermeasure for E-Television's growth.

In July 2020 the network rebranded, keeping the names but changing the general aesthetic.

Three new channels joined the network on August 1, 2022: Warna (Malay), Vaanavil (Tamil) and Extreme (English supplementary channel).

Sale and change of assets

The dissolution of Associated-Rediffusion led to the sale of E-Television to a private Lenaporean holding company, Fair Holdings Pte Ltd.

Operations

Radio

Despite E-Television's name strictly referring to its linear television and OTT operations, E-Television is partly-owned by Associated-Rediffusion, who reactivated the Rediffusion brand in Lenapore in June 2018. Rediffusion uses DAB radio, cable and satellite platforms, the internet (including apps) and the national digital terrestrial television network (since February 2019) to deliver ten radio channels. Most of these services are limited operations updating on a weekly or monthly basis. Additionally, one of the channels is the signal of Radio Northulia, the external service of the Northulian National Broadcaster.

The service is scheduled to be handed over to the new owners on November 1.

Television

Currently E-Television operates three channels: Excite (English), Entertain (Mandarin and Cantonese) and Emerald (Japanese). A fourth channel (Enjoy) is being studied yet it is unknown if it will be a Tamil/Malay channel, as the company, unlike Mediacorp, prioritizes a heavily urban audience.

OTT

E-Play is E-Television's answer to Toggle. Due to a corporate deal, it is bundled with HBO subscription channels and the HBO GO platform. Free access to the Rediffusion platform is also available under a direct link.

The deal with HBO GO stopped in 2022.