There are four active free-to-air television networks and one remaining licensed pay television network in Hong Kong. There is also a number of online subscription television services.
Currently, there are no new applicants for free-to-air or pay-tv licences.
In 2007, free-to-air television broadcasters in Hong Kong were allocated extra frequency bands and bandwidth to provide additional digital broadcasts over and above that needed to provide simultaneous digital and analogue broadcasting of the four original multi frequency free-to-air channels. Digital terrestrial broadcasts began on 31 December 2007. Analogue terrestrial television ended in 2020.
Hong Kong uses the same Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast (DMB-T/H) standard as Macau and Guangdong and, because of signal overspill, viewers in Hong Kong can receive and watch all free to air channels from these areas without much difficulty.
However, because of licensing and intellectual property reasons, except for the four local free-to-air networks and CCTV-1, a subsidiary of China Central Television (CCTV), viewers outside of certain confines are not legally allowed to watch these channels.
Residential subscribers to cable premium and subscription services are free to use these services within certain confines, usually within their own homes, and under the terms and conditions of their service provider. Other contracts deal with the provision of services to non-domestic properties, e.g. premium sport content to bars.