Is the term "KTV" in use in any English-speaking country?
The origin seems clear enough: an abbreviation for karaoke television. Whether or not the average person in China understands the origin is probably not relevant as to its popularity; after all, I think relatively few Americans could write out the long form for RSVP.
Several years ago, it was widely reported in anglophone media that some arm of the Chinese government was trying to discourage the use of roman acronyms like NBA (but not Q?), and while I think this is probably an example of press misunderstanding or exaggeration, the reports acknowledge that various acronyms are commonly used in China— indeed that various organs of the Chinese state itself are best known by their English abbreviations, like CCTV and SARFT.
KTV returns zero results from the British National Corpus, and the one entry in the Corpus of Contempotary American English is the name of a television news show. So I turn to the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE), which turns up the following results by country:
- Singapore 67
- Hong Kong 35
- The Philippines 20
- Malaysia 6
Almost all of these refer to karaoke or karaoke parlors, so depending on your standard for "English-speaking country," it does seem to be in use in Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Malaysia.
There are 8 results for the US, of which 5 come from websites about China and three come from travel blogs about China. The 11 results for the UK, similarly, are about travel in China or entertainment in China. In both cases, KTV is invariably described as the local name for a karaoke parlor.
In contrast, results for karaoke alone show
- GB 867
- US 528
- Singapore 233
- Malaysia 235
- Philippines 198
- Hong Kong 174
In fact, there are even more results for noraebang (the more obscure Korean term for the same entertainment; venues are signed with NRB) in Singapore than for KTV in either the US or UK corpora. The Google Books results for KTV, similarly, refer exclusively to karaoke parlors as they exist in China, Taiwan, or Southeast Asia.
The Yelp category is karaoke (though KTV turns up in some reviews, along the lines of This place reminds me of a KTV/karaoke place in Guangzhou). For Google Maps/Google Local in my area, there are 414 results for karaoke, and only 3 of any kind for KTV, only one of which is for a karaoke joint.
All of this suggests very strongly to me that KTV as a term referring to a karaoke establishment is not a mainstream usage in the US (and does not seem to be in the UK or Canada, either), though expats or tourists might use it, and any businesses catering to them.
Never heard of it, native AmE (California/Indiana). Google search brings up a few hits of karaoke places called "KTV" in the US, but given the prevalence of the name that you report in China, I'm guessing those US locations imported it from China rather than vice versa.