TV channels Macau

Macau's television is that of a dense, trilingual city: a public broadcaster that has served since 1984, and satellite channels serving the city and its ties across the Pearl River Delta.

How television came to Macau

A first plan for a Macau television station - floated in 1963 by a Hong Kong businessman with Japanese partners - came to nothing, and news reached the city by radio alone for two more decades. Television in Macau began on 13 May 1984, when Teledifusão de Macau, founded the year before on the base of Rádio Macau, started broadcasting a mix of Portuguese and Cantonese programming in the evening hours. It was late by regional standards, in a city then still under Portuguese administration. The company was sold into a public-private partnership in 1988 after heavy losses, split its Portuguese and Cantonese services into separate channels in 1990, and nearly closed in 2002 before the government bought back its shares. The field grew through the handover years and after, with the city becoming a meeting point of Cantonese, Mandarin, Portuguese and English broadcasting.

TDM today

TDM now runs five digital terrestrial television channels, a satellite service and two radio channels - the radio side descends from Rádio Macau, broadcasting since 1933. The company broadcasts in the city's two official languages, Chinese and Portuguese, with time slots for English, Indonesian and Tagalog, reflecting Macau's mix of communities. It also relays eight channels from mainland China, and its international channel reached viewers in Portugal in 2025. Analogue broadcasting ended in Macau on 30 June 2023.

The satellite channel

Lotus TV is Macau's satellite television channel, carrying general programming for the city and its audiences across the region. Named for the territory's emblem, it belongs to a family of premium satellite channels based in the city, alongside services such as Macau Asia Satellite Television, and it serves a place where the casino economy meets one of the oldest East-West meeting points in Asia.

From the Grand Prix in November to the Lunar New Year, Macau's channels serve a compact city with an outsized media mix - and with constant competition from Hong Kong's much larger media market, a pressure every local broadcaster has always lived with.