Prologue: 3rd days of being home. Slow day as usual.
Unlike 80% of other Malaysian telly viewers, me and my family can be considered as one of those rare people (the other 20% of Malaysian viewers) who would still tune in for Radio Televisyen Malaysia or RTM despite their rather persistent negative impression of being a government mouthpiece and their cheap broadcast quality, especially when compared to the those Mediaprima's upstart (i.e TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9 and ohh just to let you Peninsularites know, Malaysian Bornean can only receive RTM's TV1 and TV2, TV3 and ntv7 free-to-air. For more channels, fork out some extra money and get yourself Astro or those parabolic satellite dish.). So last night at 8pm, my family faithfully tuned in to TV2's Mandarin Language News and that's when I discover that they get themselves (yet another) brand new on air branding/ident/image! Switch over to TV1 for Berita Nasional, the flagship newscast of TV1 and they too got themselves a makeover.
But upon further inspection of their branding, I can't help to notice that this new branding looks oddly familiar with one news branding/ident that I happen to know...(note: I am an ident fan and sometimes I will just rip good TV/news idents across the globe just for my own viewing pleasure. My favorite: BBC's, both current and 1993 ident.) Just to illustrate my point...ITV News' ident, updated on November 2009.
And here's Berita Nasional's (TV1), Berita Mandarin, Berita Tamil and News@2. (TV2)
*edit: their video embed link doesn't work. RTM fails again.
Note: All these video are actually full-length and available over RTM's website.
So did you all see the uncanny resemblance on the opening title? Especially the one in which camera pans through glass screens with pictures on it? The only difference in that glass screen sequence is that while ITV puts on pictures that's related to the news items of the day, RTMs' are just random assortment of pictures that depicts DS Najib and 1Malaysia and cultural items (for Berita Mandarin and Berita Tamil). And ohh the color for the branding: Red (Berita Nasional), Purplish Pink (Berita Mandarin), Light Green (Berita Tamil) and Orange (News@2). It all end up hideous for some reason (lousy graphic software perhaps?). And I hate the Purplish Pink for Berita Mandarin. It's barf-tastic! Now, I am not exactly sure or aware of any standing relationship between ITV and RTM but the current RTM News' ident sure looks like a cheap knockoff of the current ITV News' branding. So what do you guys think about the current RTM's news ident.
Anyway suspicion of plagiarism aside, I think RTM News did made improvement in their news theme. Much more powerful and dynamic and each of the RTM's news have little variation in the opening theme but I feel News@2 is the best among all four. Just hope that they can get themselves a proper and actual news studio set (like TV3) instead of the crappy augmented reality news studio (and as an extra, the current ntv7 7 Edition news branding is CRAP too. I prefer the older one a few years back. And they used poorly rendered augmented reality for studio too.) It's still look awful no matter how much they try. Can't they just invest more money in expanding Angkasapuri and renovate their studio? Get a new interior designer and get a new branding agency to revamp the whole dated image of RTM. I am sure there are creative media people in Malaysia who are willing to take on the challenge!
Is there any chance for RTM to actually reach the level of respect that BBC has in United Kingdom, for both branding and editorial independence? I am still a lilbit hopeful about it!
Epilogue: It rains in Kuching every evening. How nice is it for sleeping?
2 comments:
My dear Zhe Rong, in response to your question about editorial independence for Malaysian Media, I would say NONE AT ALL.
Who are you, my dear Anon in which your identity eludes me.
Wishful thinking I know, but one can hope, right? Meanwhile, RTM should get a better, original branding instead of looking like cheap ITV knockoff.
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