About TVMost

TVMost

TVMost is a Hong Kong online video and satirical news platform created by the team behind the magazine 100Most and its publisher Most Kwai Chung, based in Kwai Chung. Built by Roy Tsui, the founder of the magazine Black Paper, 100Most and the publishing house White Paper, it was established on 18 May 2015 and produces Cantonese comedy news programmes and viral videos satirising current events in Hong Kong. Its best-known presenter persona is Terry Cheng, known on screen as Dong Fang Sheng. TVMost's slogan — “Go all out, even better without a licence” — announces its founding joke and its business model at once: an unlicensed, internet-native parody of the television establishment it imitates, which became one of the defining media phenomena of Hong Kong's social-media era.

A parody built into the name

The brand itself is the first joke. In Cantonese, TVMost's Chinese name, Maoji — literally “hairy records” — is a pun on Mou Sin, the Cantonese name of Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), Hong Kong's dominant free-to-air broadcaster. The parent brand 100Most works the same way. The parody is structural, not occasional: TVMost's programmes imitate TVB's formats — its news bulletins, its Jade Solid Gold music show, its anchor personae — closely enough that the satire lands instantly with any Hong Kong viewer raised on the originals. Its news parody, Most News, riffs on TVB's evening bulletin conventions, and its presenters perform under names that gently mangle those of real TVB anchors. In a city where TVB had been the default television experience for decades, building a spoof broadcaster was a way of claiming that inheritance for the internet generation.

Programmes and style

TVMost uploads sarcastic videos satirising Hong Kong current events, in formats spanning news, variety and documentary, published on an irregular, internet-native schedule. Its flagship Most News presents the day's hottest topics in a funny, sarcastic editorial style, broadcast on weekday evenings, while Ging Cook Gum Cook — its music programme — rewrites popular Cantopop songs with ironic lyrics about public life, in direct parody of TVB's Jade Solid Gold. Famous local celebrities including Gloria Yip, Gregory Wong and Akina Fong have appeared as special guests, lending the spoof the glamour of the thing it spoofs. The editorial formula, shared with 100Most, is to make fun of the Hong Kong government and controversial social issues by covering the most recent topics in the city — a style that resonated strongly with audiences disaffected with the establishment, and that Global Voices described as viral content satirising current affairs with a pro-democracy or localist political slant.

The 2016 awards show

TVMost's breakthrough into the physical city came with the TVMost Ten Big Ging Cook Gum Cook Award Distribution, held on 11 January 2016 at Queen Elizabeth Stadium. The show extended the Ging Cook Gum Cook programme into a full parody of the local music industry's award ceremonies, honouring artistes who had put effort into their music while satirising the establishment that usually honours them; nineteen awards were distributed, and the songs honoured were re-composed popular songs with ironic content. The ceremony was broadcast live on Now TV Channel 100 and archived on TVMost's website. Founder Roy Tsui told Marketing magazine the show was designed “just for fun” and did not need to earn a profit — yet it marked the first time a local online channel had staged a music awards presentation on the scale of TVB's own. Tickets and sponsorship proved difficult, but the event demonstrated that an internet audience built on Facebook shares could fill a major Hong Kong venue.

Most Kwai Chung and the business of satire

TVMost's parent, Most Kwai Chung Limited, was founded by Roy Tsui with Chan Keung and Bu, young media makers whose earlier work included producing parodies at Hong Kong's public broadcaster — experience Global Voices credits with sharpening their sense of how to engage audiences through spoofing current affairs. The group launched the satirical weekly 100Most in 2013 and TVMost in 2015 to harness the growing power of internet video and social media. The business proved substantial: when Most Kwai Chung submitted draft listing documents to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July 2017, the filing showed revenue of HK$95 million (about US$12.15 million) for the year from April 2016 to March 2017, mostly from digital media advertising, with gross profit of HK$58 million — a 74 percent increase over the previous financial year. The 100Most Facebook presence alone counted more than 1.1 million followers. Satire, in other words, had become one of Hong Kong's more successful independent media businesses.

Headquarters and production

TVMost is headquartered with its parent company in the Tung Chun Industrial Building in Kwai Chung, in a small flat equipped with indoor and outdoor multi-purpose production studios that also serves as the editorial office of 100Most. The modest industrial-building base is part of the brand's mythology: a spoof television station run from a factory unit, out-producing the licensed broadcasters in cultural impact per square foot. Production is built for speed and shareability — short videos responding to the day's news, fronted by Dong Fang Sheng and the Most News team, cut for social feeds rather than broadcast schedules. That workflow, closer to a digital newsroom than a television station, is what the slogan celebrates: without a licence, there is also no broadcast schedule, no format committee and no regulator-approved running order.

Anniversary shows and live events

Beyond the 2016 awards, TVMost developed a line of live spectacles, staging an anniversary show at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre and later the widely reported anniversary production at the Hong Kong Coliseum, Hong Kong's premier arena. The trajectory from Facebook videos to the Coliseum — the venue of Cantopop's biggest stars — completed the parody's arc: the fake television station had become a real entertainment institution, capable of selling out the rooms its targets played. Its inaugural music award show was itself spun out of a test at singer Denise Ho's concert in August 2015, where the Ging Cook Gum Cook quarterly selection was performed live. Live events also diversified the group's revenue beyond advertising, alongside the publishing and production-house activities of the wider Most group.

Satire and Hong Kong's public mood

Analysts of Hong Kong media place TVMost within a local culture of spoofing and political parody that flourished in the 2010s, when humour became a principal language of civic frustration. Global Voices' account of satirical media's success in Hong Kong treats TVMost and 100Most as its leading commercial examples: outlets that accumulated mass followings by saying, in jokes, what many younger Hongkongers felt about their government and their city's direction. The localist flavour of the humour — celebrating Hong Kong's language, streets and everyday culture against mainlandisation — was central to its appeal. That political charge also defines the historical window in which TVMost flourished: it is a document of a period when satire could be simultaneously oppositional, mainstream and highly profitable in Hong Kong.

Legacy

TVMost demonstrated, earlier than almost anyone in Hong Kong, that a social-first video brand could rival licensed television in attention, revenue and live-event scale. Its methods — format parody, persona presenters, songs rewritten overnight, jokes engineered for sharing — anticipated the creator economy that later transformed Hong Kong media. The print 100Most ended its weekly run in 2018 after 275 issues, moving to digital only, while TVMost's videos and shows remain the group's most successful venture. Whether viewed as comedy, media business or political barometer, TVMost is essential evidence for understanding Hong Kong in the social-media decade: a fake TV station that told the city true things about itself, and was rewarded with stadiums.