big big channel

» see bigbigchannel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Three weeks. That is the gap between TVB shutting down TVB Network Vision, its satellite pay television service, on 1 June 2017, and launching big big channel as an app on 23 June 2017. A broadcaster that had spent years defending a subscription dish business gave up on it and replaced it with something you installed on a phone, and the speed of the swap tells you how badly the first thing was going.

What launched was a livestreaming and social app built entirely around TVB's own talent roster. Close to a hundred of the station's actors turned up to the press conference, which for anyone who has watched Hong Kong television is a roll call rather than a guest list. The app mixed live broadcasts with artist-posted video in one feed, and the mechanism underneath it was a virtual gift button. Fans sent hearts and flowers. The hearts and flowers converted into money, and a share of that money went to the artist.

This is the thing that made it more than a rebrand of a website. TVB's artist contracts had a long-standing reputation in Hong Kong for keeping performers cheap while owning their visibility outright. big big channel put a revenue line between a performer and the people who watched them, inside the broadcaster's own walls, on the broadcaster's own terms. In May 2018 the company bolted big big shop onto it and started selling goods through the same app, which is where the streaming money in that part of the world was actually coming from.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the fine ~

In June 2018 Hong Kong's Communications Authority fined TVB 300,000 Hong Kong dollars for improperly mixing advertising into programming across five broadcasts. The regulator's problem was structural rather than incidental. Once a broadcaster runs a shop and a livestreaming platform and a television channel out of the same building, with the same faces appearing on all three, the line between a show and a sales pitch stops being a line anyone can point to.

~ the closing statement ~

On 2 May 2023 the app stopped. TVB folded the closure into a wider cost rationalization program, saying the service had not achieved the anticipated economic returns and that its resources would be consolidated into other TVB platforms. The phrase the company reached for was historical legacy business. Six years is not much of a legacy, but the wording is honest about what had happened: the app had become something TVB was maintaining rather than something TVB was doing.

~ the distance ~

This one is Cantonese-language and fandom-specific in a way that no amount of research closes. The app assumed you already knew which actor was in which serial and cared enough to spend money making that known publicly. I did not have any of that, and neither does anyone outside a fairly specific audience. What travels is the shape: an incumbent broadcaster losing its audience to phones, building a phone product, discovering that the audience wanted the product and not the incumbent, and closing it six years later with a line about legacy.

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