Why and how the media industry can fit into Hong Kong’s first 5-year plan

Mainstream media, particularly in Hong Kong, have historically been conservative in their research and development spending. Media executives prefer to shop for off-the-shelf solutions, treating technology as back-office support rather than a core growth engine. This mode of operation now faces an existential challenge amid the explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI), large language models and Web3 technologies. Concurrently, these developments offer Hong Kong’s media industry fresh opportunities, particularly as such innovations have been identified as key components of China’s 15th five-year plan and, by extension, a focus of Hong Kong’s alignment with the national strategy. One of the bottlenecks in AI development is the lack of high-quality, verified data that encompasses local culture and nuances. Professional journalism, in-depth reports and historical archives held by traditional media can be a gold mine for good model training. International publishers have already pivoted to monetise these assets. News Corp recently signed a deal worth a reported US$250 million over five years with OpenAI. The Associated Press, Reuters and a growing list of publishers are building recurring revenue from content they already own. Hong Kong has remained largely an idle observer. This passivity risks more than missed financial opportunities. It brings security and cultural concerns. As younger generations increasingly rely on AI models to synthesise information and understand the world, the data used to train these models becomes the new frontier of the global narrative war. If local media companies do not actively invest in processing, protecting and commercialising their data, the digital narrative of Hong Kong will be written by external models trained on unverified or biased sources. Addressing this requires a fundamental shift from both the industry and the government. The Hong Kong government encourages AI adoption in traditional sectors through programmes such as the Enterprise Support Scheme (ESS) under the Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF). Yet as of March 2024, the ESS Assessment Panel had approved 220 projects out of 762 applications. The beneficiaries were almost exclusively deep-tech start-ups, biomedical firms, microelectronic companies and software-as-a-service developers. Not a single media outlet was among them. Industry inertia is the main reason. Hong Kong media outlets traditionally invest in tech applications rather than genuine innovation, rarely designing proprietary tools with the intention of spinning them off as commercial software products for global markets. Consequently, media applications struggle to prove commercial product viability under strict innovation and technology (I&T) definitions. However, there is also the issue of bureaucratic silos. For decades, Hong Kong’s media and creative industries have been isolated in a different administrative ecosystem from tech start-ups. Media is grouped with film, sports and entertainment under bureaus that prioritise artistic creativity, cultural impact and audience reach, while the ITF focuses on hard tech. This division is outdated. Media operations – including speech-to-text, real-time multilingual translation, automated video generation, smart content recommendation and blockchain-based copyright protection – offer the most natural, high-density sandbox for developing and testing advanced AI technologies. With the right policy support, the media industry can branch out beyond the narrowly defined “culture industry” into the media-tech sector. Nurturing such a new industry would broaden professional horizons for local tech graduates, who currently face limited options. For this transformation to occur, we must dismantle institutional barriers. We could consider classifying media-tech, generative AI content and digital language infrastructure as strategic technology industries. This reclassification would grant media organisations legal and administrative parity when applying for tech funding and resources, effectively moving them from the periphery of the cultural sector to the core of the I&T ecosystem. For instance, Hong Kong currently offers a 300 per cent tax deduction for R&D expenditure, but media companies are excluded because content creation is not recognised as technical R&D. Policymakers should explicitly clarify that capital spent by media companies on developing proprietary software, algorithm engineering and data cleaning for AI training qualifies for these deductions. Even more critically, the government must establish a modern legal and technical framework to protect local intellectual property from predatory mining. Hong Kong is updating its copyright laws by introducing a text and data mining exception into the Copyright Ordinance. While this amendment aims to allow AI developers to use copyrighted data for training without prior permission under specific conditions, it must include stringent safeguards, such as legal protections for paywalls and mandate clear opt-out mechanisms for local media outlets. Because most traditional media companies lack the technical staff to build sophisticated digital walls against global AI scrapers, the government’s Digital Policy Office should step in. The DPO can help build and deploy practical shared infrastructure to explicitly signal to global web crawlers that Hong Kong media archives are protected by copyright. This regulation is not an invitation for the media industry to become free riders. Rather, it corrects a massive market failure where small local content creators face global tech monopolies. In this struggle between David and Goliath, the government cannot be just a passive referee. Only by establishing a regulated and fair market can the industry stand a chance of investing in and commercialising data for AI development. Traditional media cannot fund multimillion-dollar research on declining advertising revenues. They need structured government matching and equity investments for these changes to take place. We do not need to invent new funds; rather, we should loosen bureaucratic constraints to make existing ones accessible to the media sector. Over time, the government can champion locally developed media-tech by becoming the “first customer” that adopts tools such as public sentiment analysis and multilingual content creation. By treating media-tech with the same financial and policy weight currently afforded to fintech or biotech, the Hong Kong government can convert a legacy industry into a vibrant node of new quality productive forces. This strategy would preserve local journalism while aggressively expanding Hong Kong’s digital cultural footprint under the 15th five-year plan. In the age of AI, impactful storytelling requires technological leverage. For Hong Kong to cement its role as China’s international centre for technological and information innovation over the next decade, a vibrant media industry is critical.

Why and how the media industry can fit into Hong Kong’s first 5-year plan

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}With the right policy support, there is great scope for media operations to function as sandboxes for developing and testing advanced AI technologies

With the right policy support, there is great scope for media operations to function as sandboxes for developing and testing advanced AI technologies