TDM to extend Portuguese broadcasting hours

TDM’s Macau Channel will extend its Portuguese broadcasting schedule on weekdays, starting from today. The service will run for 12 uninterrupted hours, from 1 p.m. until 1 a.m.

Previously, much of weekday afternoons were occupied by a retransmission of RTP Internacional, a subsidiary service of Portugal’s public radio and television broadcaster. However, TDM have now decided to use this airing time for a selection of domestic productions from their archives, as well as others acquired from external sources.

According to João Francisco Pinto, the director of TDM’s Portuguese radio and television channels, the extension will “offer Macau viewers an alternative in Portuguese to the RTP International broadcast.”

“We have been planning this [extension] for quite some time, but we needed to identify what kind of programs and acquire them. The main idea is to offer Portuguese-language viewers an alternative to RTP Internacional, which is already available elsewhere,” he told the Times last night.

“Some of the programs [TDM will air] are from our archives, from the ‘80s and ‘90s,” he added. For example, “in the ‘80s, a lot of documentaries were made with the objective of portraying a certain type of life that was [then] about to disappear, like the fishing industry. Some of these programs are very rich. We are restoring them and digitizing them for rebroadcast to this new generation.”

For English-language viewers, there will be some imported programs in English with Portuguese subtitles. Re-runs of the previous night’s TDM news and certain TV dramas will be shown in the afternoon.