By the time APOS wraps on 27 April, a major question will be answered: Will Hong Kong Cable TV parent, i-Cable Communications, renew its pay-TV licence or not? The platform has been given an extended deadline, until Wednesday, 26 April, to make a decision. The current pay-TV licence expires in May this year.

If i-Cable does renew, a million questions will follow about the way forward after failing to find a buyer and being cut loose from the purse strings of parent company Wharf. If it doesn’t renew, an era ends for one of Asia’s oldest pay-TV platforms and a veil will be drawn over a sad story one insider called a “case study in value depletion”.

If it shuts down, Cable TV won’t be the first to exit the pay-TV biz. In January this year, dominant free-TV broadcaster Television Broadcasts Ltd (TVB) pulled the plug on its ever-ailing subscription-TV business, TVB Network Vision, shifting to a streaming model under myTV Super. The decision followed years of ill-fated attempts at making the pay-TV business work and billions of dollars in losses.

TVB’s move is very much a pivot rather than an exit, with news of the shutdown and the dramatic surrendering of its pay-TV licence coinciding with loud backing and even louder expansion for the one-year-old myTV Super. On the eve of the platform’s first birthday in April, TVB said myTV Super had 2.8 million subscribers.

The new myTV Super services added in April include a bouquet of third-party linear channels, plus SVOD and TVOD options. The linear services in the new 40-channel Supreme pack include CJ Media’s tvN channel, RTL CBS Entertainment and Celestial Tiger Entertainment’s KIX and Thrill channels. myTV Super said the pack would offer more than 32,000 hours of content. myTV Super will also offer a new CJ E&M SVOD Zone and SVOD/TVOD content from BBC, and is boosting its TVOD proposition in a deal with NBCUniversal, which is shutting two of its linear services.

Meanwhile, it’s full steam ahead (or seems to be) on the free-TV front, with i-Cable subsidiary, Fantastic TV, at press time still committed to launching its Cantonese channel on 14 May this year, followed in May 2018 with an English-language channel. For now, the Chinese channel is expected to draw from Cable TV’s robust news division, giving rise to speculation about the fate of the news unit if the pay-TV operation goes down.

Much quicker out the gate is PCCW’s Hong Kong Television Entertainment, which went live with its English-language free-TV channel, ViuTVsix, at the end of March. The schedule has a strong news strand, fuelled by international news outlets, including CNN and Deutsche Welle along with ABC’s 20/20 and with the promise of an even balance between local and international news.

ViuTVsix’s line up includes HBO Original dramas such as Entourage, True Blood, The Newsroom and Boardwalk Empire, which have aired across HBO’s platforms in the territory but have not been shown on local free-to-air TV channels before, along with programming for dogs and dog lovers. And a big woof to that effort to serve the under-served.

Published on ContentAsia's APOS Special, 19 April 2017