If you have ever loved a Cantopop song, cried at a Hong Kong film, followed a martial arts drama on a beat-up VHS in an Auntie's living room in Toronto, or heard your grandma humming a theme tune from 1985 while chopping vegetables — there is a very good chance TVB put it in front of you first. For nearly six decades, one Hong Kong company has been the pipeline for almost every Cantonese star, song and story that reached the world. It's called TVB, and if Cantonese pop culture has a mothership, this is it.
1967: A New Kind of Television for a New Kind of City
Television Broadcasts Limited — TVB (無線電視) — launched on 19 November 1967 as Hong Kong's first wireless commercial TV station. The company had been registered two years earlier by film mogul Sir Run Run Shaw, alongside Sir Douglas Clague and Harold Lee Hsiao-wo of the Lee Hysan family. Until then, Hong Kong TV had been wired (subscription-only), watched by a small elite. TVB put an aerial on every tenement rooftop and made Cantonese television free to anyone with a set.
The main channel was TVB Jade (翾翠台), broadcasting in Cantonese; TVB Pearl (明珠台) served the English audience. Within a few years, a huge slice of Hong Kong life revolved around Jade's evening schedule. The 7pm news, the 8pm drama, the 9pm show — they became the shared national heartbeat of a city.
The Star Factory Nobody Else Could Copy
In 1971, TVB opened its Artiste Training Class. It ran for decades and produced a graduate list that reads like a who's who of Hong Kong entertainment. Chow Yun-fat, Andy Lau, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Stephen Chow, Leon Lai, Carina Lau, Maggie Cheung and countless others came up through TVB. If they didn't attend the training class, they were spotted in the Miss Hong Kong pageant — the beauty contest TVB has broadcast since 1973 that turned into a talent-scouting pipeline for actresses.
No other Chinese-language broadcaster produced anywhere near this density of talent. For four decades, if you wanted to be a Cantonese star, TVB was the entry ramp. The company gave young actors weekly grinding schedules — sometimes twelve dramas a year for a single lead — and the survivors came out with a work ethic that later made them impossible to break in cinema.
The Drama Boom That Defined a Generation
In the late 1970s and 1980s, TVB dramas exploded across Asia. Louis Cha's wuxia novels were adapted into Cantonese-dubbed martial arts serials that Chinese-speaking communities everywhere pirated onto video tapes. Modern melodramas about Hong Kong families — The Bund (上海灘, 1980), Looking Back in Anger (維城四少, 1989), The Greed of Man (大時代, 1992) — became defining texts for a generation.
Those dramas travelled. From Toronto's Chinatown to Kuala Lumpur's Petaling Street to Sydney's Cabramatta, Cantonese diaspora households rented and swapped bootleg tapes of TVB serials. For overseas Cantonese kids who couldn't read Chinese, the Cantonese-dubbed TVB drama was often their first serious immersion in the language of their grandparents.
Cantopop's Best Friend — and Sometimes Its Only Radio Station
TVB and Cantopop grew up holding hands. Drama theme songs became the unofficial launch pad for entire music careers. Sam Hui, Leslie Cheung, Anita Mui, Jacky Cheung and Andy Lau all had career-defining Cantopop hits that started life as TVB drama themes. The company's annual awards ceremony, TVB Jade Solid Gold, became the year-end verdict on who was up and who was fading. The link was so tight that for years, a hit theme song from a TVB drama meant a guaranteed music career.
A Media Empire Built on One City
Since 2003, TVB has been headquartered at TVB City in the Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate — a purpose-built production complex where dramas, news bulletins and variety shows still get made around the clock. The company operates five free-to-air terrestrial channels and licenses programming to more than 40 countries and over 100 cities, reaching audiences estimated in the hundreds of millions across the global Chinese-speaking world.
For the Cantonese diaspora, TVB has been the umbilical cord. Long before YouTube and streaming, families in San Francisco, Toronto and London subscribed to TVB satellite feeds just to hear Cantonese in their living rooms. Even today, for millions of grandparents overseas, TVB is not just a channel — it's the sound of home.
Cracks in the Empire
The last decade has been harder. Streaming platforms, YouTube, TikTok and Netflix broke TVB's monopoly on Cantonese eyeballs. Younger Hong Kongers accuse the network of being creatively stuck, and top talent regularly leaves for freer, better-paid gigs. Yet even as its dominance erodes, TVB's back catalogue remains one of the largest Cantonese-language cultural archives ever produced. Millennial Hong Kongers still text each other The Bund theme song at reunions. Diaspora kids stream 1990s TVB dramas on their phones to feel closer to their parents.
Why It Still Matters
Whatever you think of TVB today, its imprint on Cantonese identity is enormous. For nearly sixty years, a single Kowloon-Bay company decided which Cantonese songs became hits, which faces became stars, and which stories got told to the world in Cantonese. It gave Cantonese pop culture the scale, the polish and the pipeline that no other Chinese city could match. Without TVB, the golden age of Cantopop probably still happens — but it doesn't reach a village in Sydney or a basement in New Jersey the same way. If Hong Kong is Cantonese culture's capital, TVB is the transmitter that broadcast it to the world.
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