I heard on the grapevine that former newspaper exec David Montgomery is taking charge at Made TV. It was Monty that had a vision for L!VE TV to become a local network of stations when he was at Mirror Group.
The future looks bleak though. I understand there to be considerable debt.
The thing is Sheffield Live is the worse example than of these types of stations. Iâd consider Notts, Estuary, NVTV and maybe Latest such channels that are in community radio station Iâm terms of the running and at least two of those channels arenât bad and put out a decent level of local programming.
Sad to hear about the massive cuts at Made, which are starting to show in the output, along with the single DSAT feed. However, anything they put out is still miles better than anything That's TV have broadcast.
Harder and harder to work out what the point of these was, certainly if they were all expected to be run separately and independently.
Occasionally, as sometimes posted in this thread, there is locally-relevant material on a par with what the old ITV used to come up with, but that could only work in a specific context, and local TV didn't even have that advantage.
As much as I don't like the idea of ITV getting licence fee money it would have been much better investing in restoring region programmes to the ITV network and protecting studios and the jobs associated with them around the country rather than a new hyper local TV there really was no demand for. A 30-minute peak time (non-news) regional slot would have been much more appreciated by most viewers, and probably cost less too.
I guess the next logical step though for local TV will be That's Made!
P.S. Can anyone post a weekday schedule for a That's TV channel, and how much of that is networked. Don't seem to be a schedule on their website. Also KMTV in Kent does look rather respectable, though again no schedule information other than airing 5.30-10.30 with an hour long Kent Tonight programme kicking off the night. I assume that's repeated through the evening and they have a couple of other shows on their website (specifically about politics, sport and business), so would just be interesting to see how they fill their schedule. I know they air a radio show in the morning so do they go off air during the day or simulcast another channel?
It was a stupid idea put together by a government which has a grand delusion about the UK's size and importance in the world.
The reason the US can support local commercial television services is that a) they've been doing them for years and they normally have some national spine, and b) the US has a bigger geographical reach and local is even more important there, and c) 323 million people live in the US, 65 million in the UK - it's all about scale.
Local is an unfashionable world and a lot of terrible stuff has been produced over the years to try and work out how it should be done. But it seems to me that, with scale being what the commercial world is chasing in an era when the audience within the UK has been fractured between a choice of services we could only have imagined in the 90s, it's not commercially viable to do any more. That being the case, it's a chance for the BBC to carve a real niche for itself - and not just in English local radio which is aimed at a particular older audience.
P.S. Can anyone post a weekday schedule for a That's TV channel, and how much of that is networked. Don't seem to be a schedule on their website.
Thatâs Cumbria literally has âCumbria Headline Newsâ replayed every hour of the day, and on weekend it is âCumbria Highlightsâ which is just the reports from Headline News that week replayed every hour again.
That being the case, it's a chance for the BBC to carve a real niche for itself - and not just in English local radio which is aimed at a particular older audience.
Tony Hall announced in his speech on the 50th anniversary of BBC Local Radio that they will no longer target just the over 50s, and in future it will be for 'everybody'. Whether they will be successful at attracting younger audiences I am rather sceptical about, however.
That being the case, it's a chance for the BBC to carve a real niche for itself - and not just in English local radio which is aimed at a particular older audience.
Tony Hall announced in his speech on the 50th anniversary of BBC Local Radio that they will no longer target just the over 50s, and in future it will be for 'everybody'. Whether they will be successful at attracting younger audiences I am rather sceptical about, however.
Oh I donât know. Iâm sure all the kids will be ditching Capital and Spotify for the chance of hearing a phone-in about bin collections.
