Cable manners: Hong Kong Cable TV crossed the 10-year mark at the end of October. Janine Stein asked cable boss, Stephen Ng, about a decade at the helm of an operation where business never seems to get any easier no matter how many problems are solved.(anniversary focus)

Television Asia, December, 2003 by Stein, Janine

If he had to do it all over again, i-Cable Communications' boss, Stephen Ng, says he wouldn't have taken the job, Is he joking? Perhaps not.

As Hong Kong's dominant pay-TV platform celebrated its 10th anniversary on October 31, 2003, the company also marked the end of a decade of struggle--and the apparent start of another.

And that's not just because, at the 10-year mark, the original hopes, dreams and wishes have had to be substantially down-sized to fit reality rather than business plans projections. Or because pay-TV's average revenue per subscriber is dropping from HK$244 in first half 2002 to HK$222 in the second half to HK$219 in the first half of this year. On the Internet and multimedia front, ARPU dropped by 41% to HK$125 as i-Cable...

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