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Hong Kongers began paying final tributes to the city’s oldest broadcaster, Friday as Asia Television ATV, prepares to fade to black at the stroke of midnight, after 58 years.
Well-wishers moved around the entrance to ATV’s studio well before noon taking pictures. Journalists from various media outlets flanked the gates.
ATV spent its final day on life support with only a skeleton crew of staffers who stayed, on the basis of doubtful promises of pay, after months when the station was unable to pay its staff. Workers ran a gauntlet of photographers and reporters who fired questions.
ATV’s free-to-air broadcast license lapses at midnight. The government refused to renew the license after years of ATV’s suffering cash flow problems, and irregular payment of salaries. There came a series of bids from mainland investors trying to keep the station on the air but those bids failed.
The protracted melodrama swirling around ATV’s demise would not have been out of place in one of the broadcaster’s many award winning soap operas. There were several eleventh hour counterproposals to keep the company going, including suitcases full of cash paraded in public. There was courtroom drama as staff drifted away. Only the most loyal or most essential staff members remained. A series of high-profile would-be white knight investors played hardball with each other under the watchful eye of a renowned accountancy appointed as referee, but later painted as another antagonist in the conflict.
After decades as one half to Hong Kong’s veritable television duopoly ATV will carry on, albeit in a different form, with a host of content still to be acquired and talks of entering the streaming movie and television market.
(CHINADAILY)
