Launch TalkTV

[Brekkie]

Whilst there is no doubt Piers is getting the ratings he deserves it's a shame the News Desk is doing even worse considering by all accounts it's the superior product. The big trouble here is with nothing doing well there is nothing to help channel execs work out which direction to take the channel in, or should they expand hours the route to go. For all of GB News woes they seemed to be able to work out quite well what bought them an audience and what didn't.

How are the radio simulcasts doing?

[London Lite]

The News Desk suffers from going up against Channel 4 News, which is an established analytical news bulletin. You can't stick it on at 10 as it'd be trounced by the BBC and ITV bulletins, 8pm against the peak time entertainment shows and the same for 9pm.

The actual concept and production of the bulletin is fine, but there isn't a slot for it to go into or a niche for it. The rest of the target audience are watching either Sky or BBC bulletins.

TalkTV need to decide if they want to go down the GB News route of largely culture wars content or do they want to be seen as comparable to Sky News or the BBC, which The News Desk seems to be designed for their audiences.

Personally I'd rather the channel became a mix of News UK content, so you'd get Chris Evans from Virgin in the morning, some news content from Times at drive, the specific tv content in the evening and then a TalkRadio simulcast at night. That makes it a more broader proposition and not just a better produced GB News.

[cityprod]

I think the biggest problem for Talk TV is that basically, it is a radio simulcast for most of the day, and as such, it limits their potential audience. More output produced for TV is the direction they need to go in, and lose most of the simulcast stuff.

[Jamie]

Looks like Adam Boulton will be filling in for Tom Newton-Dunn tomorrow on the News Desk.

Confirmed at the end of tonight's show. Should be interesting.

[London Lite]

More technical problems with James Whale's show. James is currently audio only from home.

[eyeTV]

[London Lite]

The ticker is now a flipper with a smaller sized font.

[LargelyALurker]

[Brekkie]

The thing is there was never really more than 32k viewers available considering day to day the news channels only get 5 figure ratings in the evening.

[Omnipresent]

ABC's Media Watch had a segment on Piers' ratings earlier this week:

https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episod...s/13927116

A couple of details:

In Australia, Piers is getting an average audience of 27,000 across five capital cities.  One edition had 18,000 viewers, less than half of the audience of 50,000 from the programme before.

Also, the edition of Piers Morgan Uncensored covering the Boris Johnson confidence vote live was repeated the following day in Australia, by which time it was obviously very out of date.

[RhysJR]

[Inspector Sands]

So he gets almost the same number of viewers in Australia as he does in the UK!? That is quite surprising considering the populations of those countries - he's actually doing a lot better in Australia with a programme that's 16 hours out of date

[Brekkie]

Plus when you consider the top weekly shows here get about 10% of the population nowadays whilst in Australia it's about 4% of the population as a share of the audience he's doing even better.

Maybe he should move out there. Please.

[LargelyALurker]

Plus when you consider the top weekly shows here get about 10% of the population nowadays whilst in Australia it's about 4% of the population as a share of the audience he's doing even better.

Maybe he should move out there.  Please.

The difference between being on an established channel with some kind of lead-in, versus a startup with wide availability, but not the best channel numbers and a lead-in of basically zero. 

The idea of them coming to some agreement with some of the local TV operators to get it on a single digit channel number in at least some of the country makes a lot of sense. Given how much they’ve thrown at this, I’m surprised that or similar hasn’t happened.

[Brekkie]

We never really get local TV ratings though but the limited info we've seen in the past and for the likes of BBC Scotland suggests being on 7/8 isn't that beneficial if the content isn't that strong, so I don't think the economies would add up.