20 Brooten, McElhone and Venkiteswaran Burma was the last country in Southeast Asia to establish a television service (McDaniel 2002), yet, despite the censorship, other forms of creative expression prospered. Well before the advent of TV, the first Burmese feature film was released in 1920. And as Jane Ferguson explains in this volume, even during the decades of military dictatorship, film studios continued to produce feature-length movies that entertained audiences in hundreds of cinemas throughout the country. Myanmar Radio was launched in 1960 and MRTV in 1980. The country was for a long time limited to three state-run stations that each broadcast a few hours a day. By 1968 the cinema industry was in decline as cinemas and production houses were nationalized (Zon Pan Pwint 2016). In the 1990s, because of a lack of resources, strict rules on content, and emerging digital technologies, producers shifted to selling their content — largely low-budget dramas and comedies — in VCD format (Lim 2012). Under military rule it was well known that a blacklist had been created of those writers forbidden to publish (Allott 1993). In another form of blacklist, various parts of the country were designated as white, brown or black areas, corresponding to the degree of control the regime had over each area. White areas designated military control, brown areas were only partially controlled by the military, and black areas were under the control of ethnic nationalist groups (Brooten 2003; Kumar 2014). Visitors to the country were generally confined to white areas, and research on the country was severely restricted. For this reason there are few scholarly works that examine the development of media and communications systems during this period. Restrictions were particularly harsh for ethnic nationalities seeking to preserve and teach their own languages, and many intellectuals from ethnic communities were arrested or went underground (Smith 1991). 1988: Uprisings, the “Democracy Spring”, and a Coup By early 1988 the Press Scrutiny Board (PSB) had relaxed its restrictions and private individuals could obtain magazine publishing licences fairly easily. By the middle of the year, more than ninety different magazines on a variety of topics were being published (Allott 1993). Massive uprisings in August and September led to a hiatus, albeit an extremely brief one, 01 ch1-MyanmarMediaIT-5P.indd 20 8/4/19 10:29 am