From a franchise tender in 1965 to a studio city in Tseung Kwan O.

TVB is the Hong Kong television company behind the Cantonese channel TVB Jade and the English channel TVB Pearl. In Hong Kong it is still widely called by its Chinese nickname, “Mou Sin”, meaning “wireless”. English Wikipedia explains the name: when the station launched, it was promoted in Chinese as “wireless television” to set it apart from the cable broadcaster Rediffusion, whose service later became ATV.

The company came out of a government tender. English Wikipedia says a franchise for a new free-to-air station was opened for bids on 6 February 1965 and closed on 6 August 1965, and that Television Broadcasts Limited was incorporated on 26 July 1965. Its co-founders, the article says, were Run Run Shaw, Douglas Clague and Harold Lee Hsiao-wo. The win was announced on 25 January 1966.

The South China Morning Post looked back at that race in a Post Magazine piece by Chris Wood on 26 November 2016. It recalled that the paper had reported on 1 October 1966 that the new wireless stations would be equipped for colour, and that in June 1966 Rediffusion had outbid Television Broadcasts at a City Hall auction for a Kowloon studio site. The wireless company opened its own premises on Broadcast Drive the following year, the article said, and broadcast in colour from its launch on 19 November 1967, with a live transmission of the Macau Grand Prix that day.

English Wikipedia adds detail to the opening. Governor David Trench opened the station in Kowloon Tong; the Cantonese channel, later known as Jade, began regular service at 4:30 p.m., and the English channel, later Pearl, at 6 p.m. The variety show Enjoy Yourself Tonight was part of the first line-up. Relay stations at Lamma Island and Castle Peak followed on 15 May 1968, the article says, with a third on Cloudy Hill that June.

The company moved twice. English Wikipedia says that by the late 1980s it had outgrown Broadcast Drive and in November 1988 opened a studio complex called T.V. City on Clear Water Bay Road, on the old Shaw Movie Town site used by Shaw Brothers since 1958. Planning for a replacement began in 1998, and the new TVB City in the Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate came into full operation in October 2003.

A rounded screen, then three colour bands, then three letters.

The first TVB mark was a picture of a television. Chinese Wikipedia, in its section on the logo, describes it as uncoloured at launch: a rounded rectangle holding a circle that stood for a television set, with the two Chinese characters for “Hong Kong” in black inside the circle. Beneath the rectangle sat the black letters “HK-TVB”, short for Hong Kong Television Broadcasts Limited, the name the company used then. The Post captions of 2016 use the same form, describing the opening ceremony of “HK-TVB”.

Colour came into the mark in 1972. Chinese Wikipedia says that when the station began broadcasting fully in colour that year, horizontal bars in the three primary colours of television were added inside the logo, in the order blue, green and red, to mark the arrival of the colour era. The Chinese characters stayed, now written in white across the green band, and the letters “HK-TVB” beneath were also set in white. The Post places colour at the 1967 launch, while Chinese Wikipedia ties the bars in the logo to full colour broadcasting in 1972.

The next change followed a reorganisation. Chinese Wikipedia says that in 1988 Television Broadcasts was restructured and listed in its own right, and that the logo dropped both the Chinese characters for “Hong Kong” and the letters “HK-TVB”. In their place came the black letters “TVB”, set either to the left of the symbol or below it. That lettering, the article says, has been used ever since.

The result is a mark in two parts that can be read separately. The symbol keeps the rounded screen and its three bands of blue, green and red, a reminder of the colour television it was drawn for. The three letters carry the name in plain black. Either part can stand on screen without the other.

Blue, green and red bands under a plain black wordmark.

Public broadcasters often keep their initials while the shape around them changes. In Belgium, Télépro reported on 23 June 2015 that a symbol drawn by the designer Michel Olyff in 1967 was shared by the French-language RTB and the Dutch-language BRT. When the RTB became the RTBF in December 1977, French Wikipedia says, the letters “RTB” and a large “F” were added to that same emblem, so the new name was set into the old mark rather than replacing it. La Libre Belgique reported on 10 June 2005 that the RTBF had then dropped the emblem for a blue corporate logo by Publicis, with black in the letter “F”.

The letters can also become the name. Danish Wikipedia dates the first DR logo to 1964, while the broadcaster was still called Danmarks Radio, and records the formal change of name to DR in 1996. When reading a broadcaster’s identity, look at which letters stay fixed through each rename, which symbol or shape is added to them or taken away, and whether the channel names are built from the parent’s initials.

Television Broadcasts Limited becomes TVB Limited.

The newest change is to the company name, not the logo. On 24 July 2026, English Wikipedia says, Television Broadcasts Limited officially changed its name to TVB Limited, citing an announcement on the TVB website that day. The Chinese title of that announcement gave the new Chinese company name as the equivalent of “Wireless Group Limited”, with the stated aim of a multi-platform entertainment and information business. Chinese Wikipedia adds that on the same date the studio complex in Tseung Kwan O was renamed simply “TVB”, the same as the broadcaster’s English short name.

The letters had been doing that job for decades. From “HK-TVB” under the television set of 1967, to the plain black “TVB” of 1988, the abbreviation has moved from the small print to the legal name of the company. The Chinese nickname has travelled the other way: “wireless” no longer distinguishes the station from cable in any practical sense, but the word stayed in everyday use, and the new Chinese company name keeps it.

The colour bars are the other constant. Blue, green and red were added in 1972 to signal colour television, according to Chinese Wikipedia, and they have outlasted both the Chinese characters and the “HK” prefix that once sat around them. Channel names built on the three letters, such as TVB Jade, TVB Pearl and the news channel TVB News, keep the same short form in front.

For a design guide, TVB shows how a broadcaster can strip a mark back in stages, first adding colour to a drawn television, then removing the place name and keeping three letters, while the core symbol survives each step. Compare NHK, the Japanese public broadcaster with its own lettered wordmark, or Mediacorp, Singapore’s national broadcaster. For this guide we use blue, green and red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep TVB’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.