Bernama TV Live Streaming – Watch Malaysia’s News Agency Channel

A news agency sits underneath the whole industry. Reporters are stationed across the country and abroad, filing copy that newspapers, radio stations, websites and television newsrooms then buy, edit and publish under their own mastheads. Readers see the masthead. The agency stays invisible.

Bernama fills that role in Malaysia. It is the national agency, government-owned, feeding material to competing newsrooms who then shape it to their own audience and tone.

Bernama TV is that same operation, broadcasting directly.

The same newsroom produces all of it, which is a different arrangement from separate language desks operating in parallel. Material gathered once is delivered four ways.

The agency first sought permission to run its own television channel in the mid-1990s. The request was turned down. Instead, the government suggested it produce video news items – material other broadcasters could use, rather than a channel of its own.

So that is what it did. The agency built video capability while remaining a supplier, and the television operation was formally established toward the end of that decade. Actual broadcasting began years later, in 2008.

A rebrand followed in the 2010s, when the channel spent a few years as Bernama News Channel before returning to its original name. High-definition broadcasting arrived in the early 2020s.