Why and how the media industry can fit into Hong Kong’s first 5-year plan
With the right policy support, there is great scope for media operations to function as sandboxes for developing and testing advanced AI technologies
Mainstream media, particularly in Hong Kong, have historically been conservative in their research and development spending. Media executives prefer to shop for off-the-shelf solutions, treating technology as back-office support rather than a core growth engine.
International publishers have already pivoted to monetise these assets. News Corp recently signed a deal worth a reported US$250 million over five years with OpenAI. The Associated Press, Reuters and a growing list of publishers are building recurring revenue from content they already own.
Hong Kong has remained largely an idle observer. This passivity risks more than missed financial opportunities. It brings security and cultural concerns. As younger generations increasingly rely on AI models to synthesise information and understand the world, the data used to train these models becomes the new frontier of the global narrative war. If local media companies do not actively invest in processing, protecting and commercialising their data, the digital narrative of Hong Kong will be written by external models trained on unverified or biased sources.