In Tune With Asia : With Cable Companies Unable to Meet the Demand, Chinese Expatriates Now Count on Satellite TV Broadcasts to Satisfy Their Craving for News and Views of Their Homeland.

Alex Yee left Hong Kong as a boy but never stopped missing the Cantonese TV shows of his childhood.

Had his family settled in a heavily Chinese community like Monterey Park, Yee could have signed up for cable TV with Hong Kong programming. But moving into a house near Dodger Stadium, the Yees were out of luck.

Until last year.

That was when two firms in Los Angeles County began offering 24-hour TV satellite service in Mandarin and Cantonese. With a $500 decoder box and less than $20 in monthly fees, Yee could receive live news and entertainment direct from Asia.

“As soon as it came on the L.A. market, I signed up,” says Yee, 27, who opted for the Jade Channel, which focuses on Hong Kong. A second station, North American Television, is more oriented to Taiwan, although each station offers programming in both languages.

The Yees are among tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants who have jumped at the chance to get closer to their homelands via satellite TV. With the high-tech revolution, any telecommunications firm can now buy space aboard orbiting satellites and beam their signals back to Earth.

Last year, North American TV and TVB Holdings (USA), parent company of Jade Channel, plunged millions of dollars into satellite broadcasting, putting out a mix of their own and imported programming and selling satellite dishes to help customers receive the signals.

Both firms see the move as a long-term investment to reach viewers outside traditional Chinese enclaves. Now, the Chinese diaspora throughout North America can keep in touch with steamy Hong Kong soap operas, Taiwanese pop stars and Mainland China financial news.

And Yee can finally sate his appetite for Hong Kong movies, which air nightly on the Jade Channel: “It’s nice to have a channel that speaks your own language,” he says.

In addition to providing immigrants with a cultural pipeline back home, Chinese satellite TV eases them into life in the United States.

Joyce Wong, a computer programmer from Taiwan who lives next to Chinatown, finds that three generations of her family watch North American TV for different reasons.

Her parents, who don’t speak English, rely on it for news--that’s how they learned about the Unabomber scare at Los Angeles International Airport. Her American-born toddlers sharpen their Mandarin with a Taipei sitcom. And Wong scans commercials to find out which stores in Chinatown have specials on rice and ginseng.

“It’s a good investment,” Wong explains. “And it’s increasing my knowledge of the world. Ten years ago, when my parents moved here, they had nothing at all to watch. Now, we can’t live without it.”

Advertisers, too, are realizing the value of the medium.

“We believe it is the most-watched station in the Chinese community,” explains Phillip So, president of one of the nation’s largest importers of over-the-counter medications from Hong Kong.

His Boyle Heights firm, SO’S (USA) Co., sponsors a weeknight variety show on the Jade Channel and advertises in its monthly TV guide.

Many advertisers are also avid viewers. Pauline Shin, vice president of Dai Cheong Trading Co., a Lincoln Heights firm that imports thousands of food products from throughout Asia, spends $6,000 per month advertising on Jade Channel.

When she goes home at night, Shin flips on the tube to relax. If it’s a weekend, she encourages her American-born children to tune in so they can practice their Mandarin and Cantonese.

One recent night, 13-year-old Vivian and her brother, Ronald, 10, picked out Chinese characters on the screen with their cousin Eleanor, 8.

“That says big and China ,” Eleanor said, pointing to individual characters.

“Not quite,” corrected Shin. “It says Mainland and China .”

Parents aren’t the only ones to realize the benefits of Chinese-language TV. In addition to ads for Chinese products, the airways teem with Chinese-language ads for mainstream American firms such as Home Depot, Target and AT&T.;

“We’re always looking for new and innovative ways to reach out to the consumer, and this is one,” says Lorain Wong, director of communications for AT&T; consumer services in Southern California, which advertises on both stations.

Round-the-clock financial coverage of the Pacific Rim can help entrepreneurs too. Jim and Sherry Lin own a Los Angeles firm that imports electronic equipment from Taiwan and say North American TV gives them an edge in business decisions.

“Sometimes they have information about trends on the Taipei stock market and the cost of materials,” Jim Lin says, scrutinizing the nightly financial report from his home in Walnut.

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His daughters Vivian, 8, and Stephanie, 7, prefer a nightly historical drama called “The Emperor of Ch’ien Lung,” which features the exploits of a 18th-Century Chinese ruler. One recent night, the children watched with their grandparents Senyen and Huan Liao, who make frequent visits from their home in Taiwan.

“I was surprised to find the same shows here,” says Senyen Liao, Jim Lin’s father-in-law. “We feel very comfortable.”

Experts say it’s not surprising to see Chinese-language TV branching into satellite. There are about 250,000 people of Chinese ancestry in Los Angeles County alone.

“Ethnic markets certainly are big,” says Tom Wolzien, a media analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., an investment research firm in New York. “And satellite is much more efficient than cable for collecting niche markets because it reaches the entire country.”

While some might suspect North American TV and TVB of duking it out for viewers and advertisers, they appeal to slightly different audiences. TVB (USA), which focuses on programs from Hong Kong in Cantonese, is part of a network giant in the British crown colony whose call letters are as familiar to immigrant viewers as NBC.

“We are the station from Hong Kong,” boasts Whayu Lin, TVB’s director of marketing.

By contrast, North American TV is more oriented toward Taiwan and Mandarin--the official language of Mainland China and Taiwan. Most of its employees in Los Angeles are Taiwanese, although a handful are from Mainland China, such as TV news anchor Andrew Zhao.

“TVB is a competitor, but competition is good,” said Jocelyn Chan, director of sales and marketing for North American TV.

Because North American TV is independent and not affiliated with an Asian TV network, it can buy programming from anywhere it likes, Chan explains. TVB, by contrast, airs only programs from its mothership channel in Hong Kong and a TVB subsidiary in Taiwan.

But Whayu Lin, marketing director for TVB, points out that the Jade Channel appeals to all overseas Chinese, not just transplanted Hong Kong audiences.

“People accuse us of being so big in Hong Kong, but now we produce Mandarin programming in Taiwan, too. We’re becoming a bit more universal.”

Indeed, the two firms are similar in many ways. Each began offering programs via cable TV more than 10 years ago and maintain those stations in some heavily Chinese areas of Los Angeles. They added satellite service after realizing it was both impractical and expensive to negotiate separate arrangements with every small cable carrier in America.

For example, in West Los Angeles, “Century Cable couldn’t give us a channel to satisfy 400 subscribers,” explains Phillip Y. Tam, vice president of TVB (USA). “Cable systems have a limited number of channels and they have to cater to CNN and HBO, which fill up their bands. If they gave us a channel they’d have to give one to the Armenians and Koreans, too.”

So each firm spends about $2 million to lease space on satellites and beam their signals back to North America. Since starting up, each has already expanded operations and now has about 50 employees at studios in Los Angeles County.

Earlier this year, TVB moved from a 5,000-square-foot facility in Monterey Park to a 28,000-square-foot building in Norwalk. North American TV recently relocated to a 10,000-square-foot facility on 4.7 acres in Rosemead.

The firms offer competitive rates: Each charges $500 for a decoder box and monthly fees of between $15 and $19. TVB has almost 10,000 subscribers; CCC has about 15,000.

By coincidence, each firm is also run by a savvy overseas Chinese businessman of 39 who was educated in the United States.

Heading up North American TV is Eddie Wang, who studied mass communications in Taiwan and received his master’s degree in business in San Diego. Tam received a degree in telecommunications from the University of Wisconsin.

Both stations offer 24-hour blocks of news, sports, business, music, drama and variety shows and contract with major domestic and foreign networks such as NBC and CBS to air international and national news feeds--including the O.J. Simpson trial.

In the next six months, both stations plan to augment local programming. TVB, which produces only one show in Los Angeles--a magazine-style program that features celebrities in Hollywood and Hong Kong--plans to add three hours of Los Angeles-based shows by year’s end.

“There’s a definite need,” Tam says.

North American TV already produces five hours of local programs in addition to Los Angeles-area news and specials, such as the Chinatown Golden Dragon Parade.

But one of its most beloved offerings is a Chinese-style “This Old House” show, in which a feng shui master gives advice on the ancient Chinese art--which links the design and placement of buildings with the health and harmony of those living within.

In just three months, the station has received 5,000 letters from subscribers.

“Chinese viewers are very vocal,” Wang says. “They have disposable income and they demand the best programming.”

News from home is also played up. When a famous Taiwanese pop star named Teresa Teng died recently of asthma at 43, reporters fanned out into Chinatown and the San Gabriel Valley for local reaction.

“People recognize us when we go to the mall, they come up and say: ‘How are you? We watch you every day,’ ” says Anne Hu, a TV news co-anchor for North American TV.

But the station also wades into American news. During the Midwest floods two years ago, North American TV raised $120,750 for flood victims during a three-hour telethon.

While Jade Channel airs U.S. news, it concentrates on overseas affairs. One recent day, employees edited a Chinese tabloid version of “60 Minutes.” Using hidden cameras, TVB news crews in Thailand had captured footage of young women from Mainland China working as prostitutes in fancy Bangkok hotels. The show would air that night.

At the TVB studios, most employees are U.S.-educated Hong Kong natives. The average age is 27, and the hip, young staff does everything from repair decoder boxes to dub voices and write subtitles, using Chinese-language software. Office vending machines carry longan fruit drinks as well as Coke.

With the Pacific Rim booming, both firms see prosperity in their future.

“The Chinese market in the United States is growing fast,” Tam says. “Since many Chinese in the United States . . . retain their Chinese language, we feel there is a great void we can fill.”

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How Satellite TV Works

* TV stations in Asia send programs to a commercial satellite orbiting the earth.

* The satellite transmits it to a 25-foot-wide satellite dish in Los Angeles, which forwards it via fiber optic cable to the studios of TVB and North American TV. At the studios, the programming is edited, mixed with local programming and assembled into 24-hour blocks.

* TVB and North American TV beam the 24-hour blocks up to another satellite, which converts them into frequencies accessible by small backyard satellite dishes.

* That satellite sends the signal back to Earth, where subscribers with decoder boxes and small dishes can receive it and watch their favorite programs.

NORTH AMERICAN TV

Cost: About $500 decoder and satellite dish plus $15 monthly fees. Information: (213) 722-8889.

THE JADE CHANNEL/TVB

Cost: About $500 for decoder and satellite dish plus $18.88 in monthly fees. Information: (310) 802-8868.