If you love recycled sportcasts and recycled films, then you will love Cable TV.
However, if you crave a live telecast of boxing bouts, a major or even minor golf tournament, or indeed any world-class sporting event, such as the recent Table Tennis World Championships in Osaka, you can forget about ever seeing it on Cable TV, because the company is too cheap to buy the feed. Its programming priorities seem to be largely dictated by bottom-line considerations.
It reckons, wrongly, that if it covers soccer, the NBA and tennis, it has got Hong Kong sports interests covered. If you are not a soccer fan, an NBA devotee or a tennis enthusiast, you are mistakenly deemed part of an insignificant sports minority. You are out of luck. You would be far better off going to the mainland where there is a much more comprehensive coverage of live sporting events.
During the Masters golf tournament, a much-anticipated event on the world sports calendar, I had to visit friends who were lucky enough to receive the Star Sports TV signal, so I could watch live coverage of the event.
I feel sorry for all sports-loving people including our sizeable expatriate community, for the paucity of live TV sports programmes in Hong Kong. Whenever there is a major world sports event, we can only read about it in the newspapers. And this is supposed to be a world-class city. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
The Hong Kong Broadcasting Authority reacts feebly whenever there is a deluge of viewer complaints. It has failed miserably to uphold the quality of TV programming. Once it has granted a TV licence, it considers its job largely done, leaving the captive viewers frustrated, and totally at the mercy of the lucky licence holder. Hong Kong, once a name I invoked with pride, is now little more than a city of greed.
