Analysis: Will Netflix change Hong Kong viewing habits? TV addicts are already split between HKTV, TVMost, ViuTV and LeTV

The January 7 arrival of Netflix can account for many a bleary eye given how many of us have been bingeing on its free content during the one-month trial period. But the majority of Hong Kong’s population have not been staying up late watching Jessica Jones marathons, or anything else.

Most local Chinese people have never heard of the American company and the availability of Netflix in Hong Kong means as much to them as the birth of HKTV last year did to non-Chinese speakers.

Ricky Wong’s HKTV was an audacious challenge to the insipid offerings by the two terrestrial operators, TVB and ATV, the latter about to lose its free-to-air licence in April.

For a while, HKTV produced original drama such as The Election, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist of Hong Kong’s political and social tensions. But the government’s controversial decision to deny it a free-to-air licence has dampened Wong’s media ambition, and he has switched his focus to expanding his online shopping mall.

New contenders are stepping into the breach. Viu TV, launched in October 2015 by PCCW, is still limited to streaming Korean television programmes via its app to subscribers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. But its decision to provide live coverage of web channel TV Most’s extremely funny, fiercely anti-establishment music awards ceremony on January 11 has been a public relations coup ahead of the April launch of its local free-to-air service. It has promised more original Cantonese content then, to be followed by an English channel a year later.

There’s also Le TV, the mainland Chinese company that paid a whopping US$400 million for the rights to show English Premier League soccer matches in Hong Kong (a more recent deal allows it to show the 2018 FIFA World Cup in the city as well). It also offers a big library of multilingual content via its set-top box or smart TV.