Hong Kong’s online TV shambles

I’ve just finished a feature slightly out of my comfort zone – Hong Kong’s online TV market, or lack thereof.

The Chinese SAR has a huge appetite for net TV – you just have to get onto an MTR, visit a dim sum restaurant or try and get past a local ambling on the pavement whilst staring at their phablet, to realise that.

The former colony also has an ideal set-up – 4G is commonplace; the locals are pretty tech-savvy early adopter types relative to the rest of Asia; and broadband penetration is amongst the highest in the world.

Yet thus far it still doesn’t have its own online TV service. Hongkongers have to get their content from mainland China or further afield to satisfy their lust for internet telly.

Local entrepreneur Ricky Wong tried his best with HKTV but hit a brick wall in the form of a government shamelessly protecting the vested interests of the region’s incumbent broadcasters.

It’s a shame because this model of broadcasting, whilst probably never fully replacing traditional modes, will definitely come to play a major part in our content consuming lives over the next decade.

Gartner’s Terick Chiu explained to me that it’s not just the online TV players and content producers who stand to benefit.

“In their efforts to drive engagement with consumers, both incumbents and new entrants are likely to invest in the technology of second-screen applications. These applications are built on top of automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies, which enable an application to detect content metadata — usually contained in a digital watermark — and synchronise the application with the on-screen programming,” he said.

“For service providers and advertisers, these second-screen apps will become an important element of the future of TV, given their ability to provide an ongoing stream of information about consumer preferences and interests. These apps also enable a form of e-commerce or ‘embedded merchandising’, which links a viewer to products/services that are featured in video programming”.

IDC’s Greg Ireland, meanwhile, argued that internet TV would “usher in a new wave of competition” in the broadcast industry – which should spell good news for viewers.

“One item to watch is how these services, or other new services, emerge as ‘true’ competitors to traditional pay TV,” he told me. “That is, will any begin to license linear content and offer a pay TV service of live and on-demand content entirely over the internet?”

It’s going to happen sooner or later in Hong Kong, as around the world, so the government might as well get out of the way and let it happen now.