Friday, February 13, 2015

The Slow Painful Death of ATV

Amid all the hopeful talk of finding new investors to revive ATV's fortunes, no one seems to be paying much attention to one awkward fact: the station's licence expires later this year.  Since it has already failed to pay its licence fee on time and cannot even afford to pay its staff at present, the prospect that any sane broadcasting authority would renew its licence is virtually nil (though in Hong Kong's current crazy political climate nothing can be entirely ruled out).  Anyone putting money into ATV would be extremely unlikely to recover their investment in less than a few years, even if they could turn the station around and persuade people to watch it again, something which would require substantial additional investment in some decent programmes.  Meanwhile they would run a strong risk of the licence not being renewed, sending their investment straight down the drain.

Unless an insane investor comes along, therefore, the station is likely to expire completely within a month or two, opening the way for a renewed licence application from HKTV which the government would find it very hard to turn down this time.

Meanwhile the station still limps feebly along.  The English evening news, now curtailed to 15 minutes, shows little sign of being edited and turns up some entertaining bloopers.  Apparently all the pilots of the Taiwanese airline that had a crash recently are going to be "evacuated" (evaluated).  Even more surprisingly, the Costa Concordia was "a floating hotel 290 km long".  That being the distance from Hong Kong to Shantou, it's not surprising it was so difficult to salvage - unless they mean 290 m, the sunken ship's real length.

And as for the sports news, why does Bo Leung insist on referring to every goalkeeper as "the custodian"?  That's a pretentious word that sports hacks occasionally use for stylistic variety, but no ordinary football fan would do so - the goalie or the keeper will do nicely, thank you.

2 comments:

nulle said...

wondering if the ATV business is a trap forcing HKTV to buy ATV's license for a pretty penny since HKTV is the renegades of the ATV a few year back....

now it is a poker game of who will win whether it is ATV/HK Gov't or the HKTV with regards to the license...

don't be surprised if nowTV, TVB and iCable somehow continue to prop by ATV by doing charity 'donation marathons' similar to one in Dec 2014...

Private Beach said...

I guess the other stations would prefer to see a weak competitor limping on than be faced with a real challenge from a new market entrant. As for the government, they just want to make sure any station toes the Beijing line. Maybe Jimmy Lai should put in a licence application to stir up some fireworks?