Sitting comfortably in front of the television and grasping the remote control, you are impressed by the range of choices: vintage comedy re-runs, movies and sports. Forget the programme schedule - video-on-demand (VOD) means you can choose.
Sounds good, but the closest to finding this in Hong Kong is sitting on the runway at Chek Lap Kok airport in a Cathay Pacific or Singapore Airlines cabin - standard, even in economy class.
Despite the brouhaha about competition reaching Hong Kong's pay-television market, viewers can only watch with envy the state-of-the-art services offered elsewhere.
In Britain, for example, the satellite television company Sky now offers digital set top boxes with built-in video recorders that allow you to stop, pause and replay live football matches or watch from multiple camera angles.
Digital upgrades have worked somewhat differently in Hong Kong. On the dominant operator's network,
i-Cable, the most noticeable change was not extra channels but the fact that channel-hopping now came with a frustrating one- to two-second pause. Rather than giving customers an enhanced service, this upgrade was to enhance i-Cable's ability to scramble channels signals and frustrate pirates.
