Big thunderstorm yesterday afternoon, so we were stuck in the flat watching the TV. We have the local cable, so there are 40 channels, but we all know that number of good things to watch on TV is not directly proportional to the number of channels. The former is more like constant, and approaching zero.
I do have a few observations nonetheless. There are a couple of healthcare-related advertising channels that would lead watchers to believe that China the land of 13 billions, is also the land of the flat chested infertiles. I did not however see any slimming adverts.
I also saw short text adverts overlayed at the bottom right of the TV screen, again, on fertility consultancy, among others. Now the operators could easily push the idea further, by turning it into GoogleAd for TV™. Imagine, when the soap drama shows Sister Ka Yin shopping in a supermarket the text ad is for the local Park’n Shop or Welcome, or a text ad for the local plumber when there is a scene of plumbing problems, or even a text ad for an insurance company when there is a scene of a car accident or something. This beats product placement for being much more proactive, in the sense that in product placement the products involved are normally already well know, but text ads may serve anybody.
Picked up La prophétie Des Grenouilles on DVD and Eason Chan’s latest album, all duly licensed for the Chinese market, for HK$15 and HK$20 respectively. The former only contains the PTH and French sound tracks, but good subtitles(!) and the lyrics of the latter is in Simplified Chinese characters. Couldn’t find any pirated DVDs.
Visited a QiShing shop. The DVD players were good-looking and like any other Chinese-made DVD players, would play anything that resembles a CD. A few interesting AV amplifiers for under HK$1K, with touch sensitive panel blue LED etc. One model even sports two vacuum tubes. None of the amplifiers were wired up to any speakers so I didn’t get to listen to them. However, even if they all sound absolutely crap right now (which is unlikely) the lo to mid range of AV amplifiers made by Sony Kenwood Denon et al are pretty much doomed.