Some time back, Cable TV used to re-broadcast the four local terrestrial TV channels. Then they stopped doing so, presumably because they didn’t have any spare capacity.
Now they have converted their network to digital and have vast capacity, and recently they started carrying the channels (TVB Pearl & Jade and ATV World & Home) once more. However, today’s SCMP reports that TVB have employed our learned friends to instruct them to stop doing this, presumably for some spurious legal reason. Perhaps it’s a standard letter they send to all the cable companies in Guangdong, and they didn’t realize that Hong Kong Cable TV broadcast all the original adverts rather than adding their own. They must be surprised that someone took notice of it.
The odd thing about this is that in the UK, the cable companies are legally required to carry the terrestrial channels (yes, even Five). Yet in Hong Kong, it is apparently considered to be a bad thing to make TVB Pearl available to more people. Come to think of it, perhaps I can see the logic in that…
Ordinary Gweilo 
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