Local TV

[commseng]

Local radio in Ipswich shows what sort of thing could happen.
Started in 1975 as Radio Orwell, added Saxon Radio in Bury St Edmunds in 1982 with some shared programming.
Bought out by Radio Broadland in 1990 to form East Anglian Radio.
Then rebranded as SGR (Suffolk Group Radio) in 1992 and all programming from Ipswich.
Bought out and in 2009 rebranded as Heart - now the local programme is from Norwich.

Not any more it isn't - Norwich-based programmes on Heart are long-gone.

Indeed, the regional Heart show comes from Milton Keynes.

So it does, I had forgotten that. Milton Keynes serves Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Hertfordshire all from studios in Buckinghamshire.
The point in relation to local TV is that the largest and profitable commercial radio group in the UK, the one with the heritage in the area, has chosen to take the full advantage of centralising as much as it is allowed to do.
The far less profitable (I assume) local TV stations are going down the same route, and while I cannot blame them for doing so, it rather undermines their raison d'etre.
OFCOM are unlikely to force a change of operator, in the same way the licence award from Town 102 to Ipswich 102 didn't make much difference 2 years later.

[Keith]

I do wonder if we'll ever see a time when there is the political will to see the regulator reinstate stricter local and regional requirements on commercial TV and radio.

I suspect if there was an admission the Local TV network was a failure and licences weren't needed they'd probably put the onus on the BBC to plug the so called gap, which of course is what they wanted to do in the first place with the trials of a looped hour of local news for the West Midlands, split into ten minutes sub-regional chunks. That sort of thing could easily be done through the iPlayer nowadays provided they have adequate funding to provide such a service.

I suspect if there's any change it won't come until there's a change in government, as if I recall local TV was a pet project of Jeremy Hunt back in 2010. I doubt it's high on the current political agenda, and they're unlikely to want to admit that for the most part local TV has been a failure.

Personally I think that OFCOM should enforce a requirement for the licence holders to either increase the amount of local content to a more substantial amount (e.g. 10 hours a week), or forfeit their freeview channel 7 (or 8) number and move to a free number in the 90s. I suspect some would happily accept relegation or That's TV might just then close their local channels and rebrand 'That's TV Gold'.

When it comes to local radio I think this can still work fairly well, perhaps in part due to lower overheads. Where I live our local radio station has recently won a few national awards for its programmes.

[London Lite]

When it comes to local radio I think this can still work fairly well, perhaps in part due to lower overheads. Where I live our local radio station has recently won a few national awards for its programmes.

You may be lucky that you still have a locally operated commercial radio station but most of the former ILR and small scale commercial stations are now in the hands of either Bauer or Global who through economies of scale have managed to make some unviable radio station licenses worth keeping through networking on a national or regional level.

This leaves a handful of independents like Radio Jackie and Mansfield 103.2, the community sector and more importantly BBC local radio in England which moved to a ILR style entertainment format over the last couple of years, reducing news content and adding more recent music.

[Keith]

When it comes to local radio I think this can still work fairly well, perhaps in part due to lower overheads. Where I live our local radio station has recently won a few national awards for its programmes.

You may be lucky that you still have a locally operated commercial radio station but most of the former ILR and small scale commercial stations are now in the hands of either Bauer or Global who through economies of scale have managed to make some unviable radio station licenses worth keeping through networking on a national or regional level.

This leaves a handful of independents like Radio Jackie and Mansfield 103.2, the community sector and more importantly BBC local radio in England which moved to a ILR style entertainment format over the last couple of years, reducing news content and adding more recent music.

My local is Black Cat radio, which is a community radio station that airs locally on 102.5FM. I know some community radio stations can be hit and miss in terms of quality. It probably helps that its founder Tony Gillham has worked on BBC local radio stations. (Info on their recent award can read in local press.)

[Spencer]

Thought this was quite funny…

https://twitter.com/a516digital/status/1...15749?s=21

I’m sure they’d have loads of viewers otherwise.

[Medianext.MX]

I do wonder if we'll ever see a time when there is the political will to see the regulator reinstate stricter local and regional requirements on commercial TV and radio.

I suspect if there was an admission the Local TV network was a failure and licences weren't needed they'd probably put the onus on the BBC to plug the so called gap, which of course is what they wanted to do in the first place with the trials of a looped hour of local news for the West Midlands, split into ten minutes sub-regional chunks. That sort of thing could easily be done through the iPlayer nowadays provided they have adequate funding to provide such a service.

I suspect if there's any change it won't come until there's a change in government, as if I recall local TV was a pet project of Jeremy Hunt back in 2010. I doubt it's high on the current political agenda, and they're unlikely to want to admit that for the most part local TV has been a failure.

Personally I think that OFCOM should enforce a requirement for the licence holders to either increase the amount of local content to a more substantial amount (e.g. 10 hours a week), or forfeit their freeview channel 7 (or 8) number and move to a free number in the 90s. I suspect some would happily accept relegation or That's TV might just then close their local channels and rebrand 'That's TV Gold'.

Speaking of which, I found the original licence applications, and I was really surprised of the variety of submissions Ofcom received, for example, they were lots of indies (like Riverside) which promised a lot, even some winning licenses promised a lot, but they failed to deliver (like ESTV). And That's, when it wasn't a cookie-cutter cost-cutting raid local TV company, did promise a lot, as shown here...

Here is the That's TV Solent bid from 2012 - 51 hours of original programming a week, 50% of primetime being live. Ambitious, yes, Realistic, no. But to go from that being the pledge upon launch to just a 10 minute news bulletin a day within a decade highlights what a farce it is. Even just looping that bulletin for an hour, or repeating it a couple more times in the evening, would at least keep up the pretence it is a local service.

There were other groups who had some promise, like the Metro8 group, which was owned by Canadian indie Channel Zero (owned by Romen Podzyhun and Cal Millar), and wanted to export the relatively low-cost and hybrid rolling news/primetime movies programming model of its recently bought Hamilton, Ontario station CHCH (itself based on Citytv and CP24, as well as the glory years of TBS as superstation) into various regions, including Manchester. There was also YourTV, which focused on community-driven programming alongside news and features, and the Tindle/Archant/Reach consortium called LondonTV, which mixed local programming with American syndicated fare from Sony Pictures Television (which was, by far, the more realistic of the London applications, as it had a more realistic plan than that of ESTV).

The archives can be found here, and it is all together packed in a ZIP format so you can easily download it.

[Mouseboy33]

I remember reading the proposals that were put forward and it was simply shocking the choices that were made and which groups were unfortunately awarded contracts. Also some cities should never had bids put out as they were too small to sustain them. Instead the channels cannibalized each other and the advertising base. Really sad. That was a prime opportunity to allow local tv to gain a foothold. But because they had timid, clearly inexperienced decision-makers the UK ended up with a sad, public access low quality channels masquerading as commercial local stations that had no chance of making a profit to be sustainable. What waste on so many levels.
I was particularly excited about Metro8 Group. They bought a wealth of experience to table and since the UK Local Tv model was supposed to be slightly based on the North American model, it was weird the big city contracts werent awarded to a group that bought more experience...instead Manchester ended up with Thats Tv . Whilst Bham struggled finally to get something called BigCentre and then for it all to eventually to collapse. What a mess.

From the CultureVulture website:

Metro 8 Leeds, the next to be told ‘It’s not you’, had strong management but ‘did not demonstrate an understanding of the needs of the local population to the same extent as the other four applicants’

Clearly it shows the decision-makers had no idea how to make this choice. So they turned down the most experience group, because they thought they knew what the local population needs...well how would the population know if they never a local tv station and if that model is fiscally sustainable? Well the results bears that the wrong choice was made. Clearly.

[Brekkie]

I think the biggest issue was that OFCOM and the government failed to establish the "needs of the local population" before starting the entire process as I suspect nobody felt they needed a new poorly funded inexperience local TV station.


The rules surrounding the requirements were too tight as well and too specific. Whilst they should never have been reduced to the point we've seen where many services don't have anything like a local character, never mind local content, I think the services may have had a better chance had they had a broader framework to provide the content.

Many contracts seemed to limit the hours of repeats as less than the hours of new content which in todays world doesn't really work - it would have been better to allow stations to follow a model many fledgling digital stations have over the last 20 years and initially launch with a service which relied heavily on looping content rather than expecting to fill many hours with new programmes. Yes, there needed to be minimum requirements for new and local content, and rules on what airs in primetime especially, but a couple of hours looped trying to catch audiences at different points during the day would have had more of a chance than a wider range of programmes which were limited in how often they could be repeated.

I also think a tie up with the Community Channel (or Together as it is now) would have helped for filling the off peak hours, and it would be a natural partnership too to give some content commissioned for the local channels a second outing.

[Spencer]

I honestly think the whole local TV concept was fundamentally flawed, and doomed to failure from the outset. I don’t think had anyone else been awarded licences that the outcome would have been much different.

In an era when local newspapers and local commercial radio stations were struggling to make ends meet, the notion that local commercial TV, which was always going to be harder and more expensive to make to a professional standard, was going to be viable was ludicrous.

Perhaps had it come along a few decades before, it might have stood a chance of success without having to compete with scores of digital channels, streaming services and the internet. There was the possibility, of course, that Channel 5 could have been a network of local TV channels. But I suspect had that been the case, by now they’d all have gone the way of the ITV regional companies and most commercial local radio stations.

[all new Phil]

I think all that has been demonstrated is that there is little appetite for poorly produced content presented from an echoey room with cheap looking graphics and poor sound (see also GB News). An initial investment in studios and production equipment would have made a big difference.

That’s Lancashire was initially quite good in comparison to others and to what they are now. They were live for quite a lot of the time, they had decent presenters and reporters actually in the area. My mum had it on all the time. Now she doesn’t.

[LI4M]

I do still think that there would have been some milage in a properly structured local television network with contract for primetime a network programmes and the local stations acting as affiliates. Maybe that model would still have struggled in a time when more and more people were moving to streaming, away from regular television, however.

Maybe, if the govt was determined to create the individual local stations as they did with no proper 'backbone', they might have at least had more of a shot if they had been regional stations instead of 'city' channels.

Who knows the only successful part of the whole thing is the multiplex operator. It would be a shame for their business to be destroyed through licence withdrawal, just because their contractors (admittedly the reason the L mux exists) are near-universally useless.

[London Lite]

They should use the Swiss model, which is to produce two-three hours of content, debut it in the evening and then loop it, but Local TV Ltd seems to have a model of making revenue by sub-letting their low numbered LCN 7/8 slot to low budget Freeview channels to simulcast.

Or there's the That's TV method of paying journalists peanuts and showing crusty old pop videos and archive shows on the cheap.

[LI4M]

Subletting a few hours a day of their high-value EPG slot wouldn't be something that I would necessarily have issue with if it was what enabled the channels to produce a couple of hours or so of viable news content. But if it brings money in, that money certainly does not make it into the content.

Even with pop music videos - I'd be in favour of them giving over afternoons to an (old school) 'The Box' style jukebox if premium rate selections and texts could underwrite some actual local journalism.

[Brekkie]

I've no issue with some hours being licenced out but unless primetime is distinctly local I see little point in these channels existing. As you say though there is little evidence that money goes into programming and ideally any simulcast would be at maximum 12 hours a day and have to meet some kind of quality threshold itself.

That can work alongside the Swiss model as described - new content 5-7pm, repeated at 7 and 9 and ideally at least once the following day. Even if just an hour that would be better than now.

[LI4M]

Would a local 'primetime' have any chance though? or would that just be another way to hemorrhage money?
Even in places where local is profitable, primetime is usually where you put the stuff that pays for the local content.

Local breakfast maybe makes sense - but would local really have a chance of getting any audience in the exact programming blocks when high-budget broadcasters are going hell-for-leather to bring in high-audience figures?