Miss Hong Kong votes debacle sparks calls for more free-to-air competition

The epic failure of TVB's first public vote for its Miss Hong Kong pageant has brought a call for speedier introduction of competitors into the free-to-air television market.

Director of Baptist University's film academy Dr Cheuk Pak-tong said that the chaos on Sunday night - when the online voting system was brought down by 14 million hits - exposed TVB's inadequate technical know-how of new media.

The broadcaster has said the debacle was due to hacking, but Cheuk said it happened largely because TVB had not faced any real competition for decades.

"How can you avoid making the same mistake? There's no better way to monitor broadcasters' service than by introducing new players," he said.

TVB has long dominated the market over its lone, much weaker competitor ATV. There had been hopes that the duopoly would be broken when City Telecom and subsidiaries of i-Cable Communications and PCCW applied for a new free-to-air licence more than two and a half years ago. The Broadcasting Authority, now the Communications Authority, made recommendations last May but there has been no progress since then.

Since Sunday, TVB's broadcasting general manager Cheong Shin-keong is understood to have had meetings with technology company Cherrypicks, which programmed the voting system, and internet server supporter Microsoft.