Ordinary Gweilo

I am rather surprised by this, but I think I have to report that digital tv in Hong Kong isn’t as bad as some people have suggested.

The digital channels have been allocated to TVB and ATV.  TVB’s Jade HD is one of the two high-definition channels, and (no surprise here) it is basically a high definition (HD) simulcast of Jade.  The obvious problem is that, well, this is TVB Jade. Eating a Big Mac and fries from the finest china does not make it any more delicious.    

However, as luck would have it, they only have a few hours of original HD material, and so outside prime time they also show US drama series (currently Heroes and Lost) that were made in HD, and even the odd NBA game or two, complete with English soundtrack. 

TVB Pearl is only available in standard definition (SD), but with potentially better picture quality and widescreen.  This means that US drama shows, such as Desperate Housewives & ER (which are filmed in widescreen HD) look much better here than on traditional analogue TV – as do feature films (when they remember to put them out in widescreen format, which isn’t all the time).

Of course, other programmes look less impressive, the picture quality of the original being the limiting factor.  For anything that is in the traditional TV format of 4:3 the black bands on each side of the screen are rather distracting (though you can stretch the picture to fill the screen). 

J2 is the sole digital-only channel from TVB (as far as I can tell).  The listing are all in Chinese, but they do seem to have some English language content.

The “other” TV company in Hong Kong is ATV, and so far their embarrassing digital effort demonstrates why they are so far behind TVB.  ATV’s high-definition channel is only on-air for 2 hours per night.  And when it is on-air, most of their other digital channels stop broadcasting.  Eh?

ATV World is also available on digital, but (unlike TVB) when they show something that was filmed in widescreen, it seems to appear with black bands at the top and bottom and at left and right, so it actually looks worse than on the analogue version of the channel.  Blimey.

However, ATV have at least made the effort to provide new digital-only channels.  One is a news channel, and another is a “cultural” channel with material from RTHK and bought-in documentaries (with English soundtrack usually available).  The other two appear to be called ‘His TV’ and ‘Her TV’. 

One other advantages of the digital service is that it comes with an Electronic Programme Guide (EPG).  This is moderately useful if you want to know what’s on (especially as the SCMP doesn’t publish listings for the digital channels), but more importantly it should also enable someone to produce a more user-friendly HDD/DVD recorder.  In the UK I believe you can buy devices that record multiple channels, and will also ‘buffer’ all the channels for an hour or two – so you even if you missed the beginning of a show you can still watch it from the start. 

Well, yes.  Maybe not such a big advantage after all.  I’ll get me coat.