Television in Hong Kong is primarily in Cantonese and English. It is delivered through analogue and digital

terrestrial Terrestrial refers to things related to land or the planet Earth, as opposed to extraterrestrial. Terrestrial may also refer to: * Terrestrial animal, an animal that lives on land opposed to living in water, or sometimes an animal that lives on o ...

cable Cable may refer to: Mechanical * Nautical cable, an assembly of three or more ropes woven against the weave of the ropes, rendering it virtually waterproof * Wire rope, a type of rope that consists of several strands of metal wire laid into a hel ...

IPTV Internet Protocol television (IPTV), also called TV over broadband, is the service delivery of television over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. Usually sold and run by a Telephone company, telecom provider, it consists of broadcast live telev ...

, and the Internet.

Satellite TV Satellite television is a service that delivers television programming to viewers by relaying it from a communications satellite orbiting the Earth directly to the viewer's location.ITU Radio Regulations, Section IV. Radio Stations and Systems ...

is not common, although many housing estates have dishes and re-distribute a limited number of free channels through coaxial cables. The dominant broadcaster is

TVB Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB; zh, t=電視廣播有限公司) is a television broadcasting company based in Hong Kong. The company operates five free-to-air terrestrial television channels in Hong Kong, with TVB Jade as its main Canton ...

ViuTV ViuTV is a Cantonese language Generalist channel, general entertainment television channel in Hong Kong operated by HK Television Entertainment (HKTVE), whose parent company PCCW also operates the IPTV platform Now TV (Hong Kong), Now TV and the ...

and

HOY TV HOY TV is a Cantonese language general entertainment television channel in Hong Kong operated by Fantastic Television, whose parent company i-Cable Communications also operates the IPTV platform Cable TV. Its sister station is the English-languag ...

History

Hong Kong's television history began with the launch of Rediffusion Television (RTV) on 29 May 1957 (later renamed as Asia Television (ATV)). RTV started off as a cable subscription service but became a free-to-air broadcaster in 1973, with Cantonese and English channels. In April 2016, the Executive Council decided not to renew ATV's broadcast licence and its channels closed. Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) was the territory's first

free-to-air Free-to-air (FTA) services are television (TV) and radio services broadcast in unencrypted form, allowing any person with the appropriate receiving equipment to receive the signal and view or listen to the content without requiring a subscri ...

commercial station (launching in 1967) and remains the predominant TV broadcaster today with multiple Cantonese channels and one English channel, on analogue and digital. A short-lived network, known as

Commercial Television Commercial broadcasting (also called private broadcasting) is the broadcasting of television programs and radio programming by privately owned corporate media, as opposed to state sponsorship, for example. It was the United States' first model ...

, opened in 1975 and operated for about three years until its bankruptcy (see

1970s in Hong Kong Hong Kong in the 1970s underwent many changes that shaped its future, led for most of the decade by its longest-serving and reform-minded Governor, Murray MacLehose. Economically, it reinvented itself from a manufacturing base into a financial ...

). Government-owned Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) (a radio broadcaster from 1949) starting making TV programmes in 1976—to be aired on TVB and ATV and later on HKCTV and Now TV. In 2016, RTHK took over the analogue frequency of ATV and now also has its own digital channels. HKTVE, commonly known as

started broadcasting in 2016, digital-only, with a Cantonese channel and an English channel. In May 2017,

Fantastic Television i-CABLE HOY Limited (, or HOY, formerly known as Fantastic Television Limited () ) is a commercial free-to-air television broadcasting company in Hong Kong owned by i-Cable Communications, which previously owned and operated Hong Kong Cable Tel ...

started digital free-to-air broadcasting, but after a year they moved their content to HKCTV. There was also an

Internet television Streaming television is the digital distribution of television content, such as films and television show, television series, Streaming media, streamed over the Internet. Standing in contrast to dedicated terrestrial television delivered by Broadc ...

and VOD channel called Hong Kong Technology Venture (HKTV, owned by the City Telecom, which was renamed as the same name in 2013) which was launched in 2014 and can be viewed on

smart TV A smart TV, also known as a connected TV (CTV or, rarely, CoTV), is a traditional television set with integrated Internet and interactive Web 2.0 features that allow users to stream music and videos, browse the internet, and view photos. Smart T ...

set-top box A set-top box (STB), also known as a cable converter box, cable box, receiver, or simply box, and historically television decoder or a converter, is an information appliance device that generally contains a Tuner (radio)#Television, TV tuner inpu ...

es, personal computers, smartphones, and tablet computers, then closed in 2018. And ATV was revived as the OTT platform in 2017 and is still running today.

Subscription networks

* ''

Cable TV Hong Kong Hong Kong Cable Television Limited (), formerly known as Wharf Cable Television Limited () until 31 October 1998, is a cable television provider in Hong Kong currently owned by Forever Top (Asia) Limited, which operates it as a part of i-Cable ...

(Hong Kong Cable Television Ltd)'': controlled by

Forever Top Forever Top (Asia) Limited () is a company based in Hong Kong founded by , the current head of Far East Consortium. The company initially applied for a free-to-air television broadcast license under the name of New Asia Network (NAN; ). The comp ...

, operates over 100 channels with programmes broadcast in English,

Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...

Putonghua Standard Chinese ( zh, s=现代标准汉语, t=現代標準漢語, p=Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ, l=modern standard Han speech) is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912–1949). ...

and other languages. * '' Now TV (PCCW-HKT Interactive Multimedia Services Ltd)'': provides 25 free channels and over 200 pay channels with programmes broadcast in

English language English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...

(Supreme Sports Pack, World Entertainment Pack 1 & 2, Movies Pack 1 & 2, International News Pack, Kids Pack, Knowledge Pack),

, Japanese and Korean (Chinese Movies Pack & Asian Entertainment Pack), Pinoy (Filipino Pack), French (French Pack) and Indian (Indian Pack 1–3). * ''

's MyTV Super''

Satellite TV

* ''

Phoenix Television Phoenix Television is a majority State-owned enterprise, state-owned television network that offers Standard Chinese, Mandarin and Cantonese-language channels that serve mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and other markets with substantial C ...

'': also broadcast in

Greater China In ethnogeography, "Greater China" is a loosely-defined term that refers to the region sharing cultural and economic ties with the Chinese people, often used by international enterprises or organisations in unofficial usage. The notion contains ...

Programming

Hong Kong's soap drama, comedy series and

variety show Variety show, also known as variety arts or variety entertainment, is entertainment made up of a variety of acts including musical performances, sketch comedy, magic, acrobatics, juggling, and ventriloquism. It is normally introduced by a comp� ...

productions reach mass audiences throughout the Cantonese-speaking, and even Mandarin-speaking, world.

Regulatory control

Television in Hong Kong is not subject to China's regulatory or 'content' control and is under the purview of the

Communications Authority The Communications Authority is a statutory body responsible for licensing and regulating the broadcasting and telecommunications industries in Hong Kong. It was formed in 2012 through a merger of the Hong Kong Broadcasting Authority, Televisio ...

in Hong Kong.

Digital terrestrial television

Hong Kong was not required to follow China's DTT standard, but the Hong Kong government nevertheless opted to use DMB-T/H (now known as

DTMB DTMB (Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast) is the digital TV standard for mobile and fixed devices, developed in the People's Republic of China. It is used there and in both of their special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau), and ...

) as the digital terrestrial television broadcast standard in 2004 (hence rejecting the

DVB-T DVB-T, short for Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial, is the DVB European-based consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital terrestrial television that was first published in 1997 and first broadcast in Singapore in Fe ...

standard originally proposed in 1998 and trialled in 2000). The official start of DTT broadcasting was at 7pm on 31 December 2007 as the first digital TV signal transmitter in

Tsz Wan Shan Tsz Wan Shan () is a residential area in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Located below Temple Hill, it is administratively part of Wong Tai Sin District. Temple Hill is also called ''Tsz Wan Shan'' , but Tsz Wan Shan usually refers to the area. It is ...

went online. In October 2007, both broadcasting companies agreed to use the

MPEG2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods ...

video standard for broadcasting free-to-air channels (TVB Jade, ATV Home, TVB Pearl and ATV World); the

H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and d ...

video codec was implemented for all DTT-only channels. For the audio codec, usual DTMB

es would support

MPEG-1 Audio Layer II MP2 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer II or MPEG-2 Audio Layer II, sometimes incorrectly called Musicam) is a lossy audio compression format. It is standardised as one of the three audio codecs of MPEG-1 alongside MPEG-1 Audio Layer I (MP1) and M ...

(MP2) for

stereo Stereophonic sound, commonly shortened to stereo, is a method of sound reproduction that recreates a multi-directional, 3-dimensional audible perspective. This is usually achieved by using two independent audio channels through a configurat ...

audio tracks, and

Dolby AC-3 Dolby Digital, originally synonymous with Dolby AC-3 (see below), is the name for a family of audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. Called Dolby Stereo Digital until 1995, it is lossy compression (except for Dolb ...

for 5.1

surround sound Surround sound is a technique for enriching the fidelity and depth of sound reproduction by using multiple audio channels from speakers that surround the listener ( surround channels). Its first application was in movie theaters. Prior to ...

audio tracks. The official specification defines standard-definition broadcasting as

576i 576i is a standard-definition television, standard-definition digital video mode, originally used for Digitization, digitizing 625 lines, 625 line Analog television, analogue television in most countries of the world where the utility frequen ...

at 50 fields per second and high-definition broadcasting in

720p 720p (720 lines progressive) is a progressive HD signal format with 720 horizontal lines/1280 columns and an aspect ratio (AR) of 16:9, normally known as widescreen HD (1.78:1). All major HD broadcasting standards (such as SMPTE 292M) includ ...

at 50 Hz or

1080i In high-definition television (HDTV) and video display technology, 1080i is a video display format with 1080 lines of vertical resolution and Interlaced video, interlaced scanning method. This format was once a standard in HDTV. It was particular ...

at 50 Hz. All major transmitters were completed by 2008, covering at least 75 percent of the Hong Kong population. The current coverage reaches 99% of the population. Full digital television broadcasts began on 1 December 2020, postponed from the originally planned date in 2015. Starting 1 December 2021, six digital television channels (being

TVB Jade TVB Jade (), or simply Jade, is a Hong Kong Hong Kong Cantonese, Cantonese-language Terrestrial television, free-to-air television channel owned and operated by Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) as its flagship service, alongside its sister n ...

ViuTVsix ViuTVsix is a free-to-air English language Generalist channel, general entertainment television channel in Hong Kong operated by HK Television Entertainment (HKTVE), whose parent company, PCCW, also operates IPTV platform Now TV (China), Now TV ...

RTHK TV 31 RTHK TV 31 (, formerly RTHK TV 31A for analogue TV) is a 24-hour Chinese-language free-to-air television channel in Hong Kong, owned by RTHK. It is one of RTHK's six channels alongside RTHK TV 32, RTHK TV 33, RTHK TV 34, RTHK TV 35 and RTHK ...

, RTHK TV 32 and RTHK TV 33) will transit from frequencies in the 600/700 MHz bands to the 500 MHz band to support and boost telecommunication services for applications like 5G networks as well as improving network coverage. A six-month transition stage from 1 April will simulcast TV channels on both existing and new frequencies to smoothen the transition.

References

External links

Hong Kong Government digital TV website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Television In Hong Kong