ENG-1995 — Page 385

COMMUNICATIONS AND THE MEDIA

after the exclusivity of the existing subscription television licensee runs out at the end of May 1996; (c) the mid-term review of the licence of the Hong Kong Commercial Broadcasting Company Limited, which was completed in October; and (d) the formulation of a licensing regime for video-on-demand services. Meanwhile, the mid- term review of the licence of Hutchvision Hong Kong Limited was under way.

Television Broadcasting

Commercial Television

Television viewing remained Hong Kong's most popular leisure activity in 1995, with virtually every household possessing one or more television sets; 67 per cent of households also possessed a video cassette recorder. Each of the commercial television licensees, ATV and TVB, provided one Chinese and one English language channel and together, on average, they transmitted over 585 hours of programming per week

an increase of about 1.6 per cent compared with 1994.

Infotainment magazines, such as Hong Kong Today on ATV's Chinese service, and Focus and Focus on TVB's Chinese service, became very popular and led to head- to-head competition between the two stations. Live telecasts of international sports events, fund-raising charity shows, musical specials and beauty pageants sustained their appeal and won high audience ratings.

On the English services, although emphasis was placed on news and current affairs programmes, the major attractions remained feature films, sports events, documentaries and drama. More Putonghua and other non-English programmes were broadcast on the English channels during fringe hours.

The increasing use of multi-channel sound television broadcasts with the Near Instantaneous Companding and Multiplexing (NICAM) system on both the English and Chinese commercial television services enabled more programmes to be broadcast in multilingual and stereo formats. Sub-titling was introduced on some news broadcasts to meet hearing-impaired people's need for information, extending the service which already covered documentaries, current affairs programmes and feature films.

Satellite Television

STAR TV provides satellite television and sound services from Hong Kong to the Asian region. It delivers a mix of free-to-air and encrypted channels providing sports, music, entertainment, news and Chinese language and Hindi language programmes to more than 220 million television viewers in 53 countries stretching from Japan to Turkey and from Indonesia to Mongolia. A special channel for South-East Asia was launched in May 1995 via the Palapa B2P satellite. The channel, offering a combination of sports, music and movie programmes, extends the reach of STAR TV to about one million television homes in South-East Asia that cannot pick up its transmissions from the AsiaSat-1 satellite. The station will join forces with an Indonesian pay television operator to bring a package of pay television channels to audiences in Indonesia once it starts broadcasting from its new satellite, AsiaSat-2. From June 1995, four of STAR TV's channels were carried on Singapore CableVision.

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