London Live

But what about, say, Paris? Local news channels are not just a U.S. concept. If done right, with a serious investor, there's no reason why a huge, wealthy city like London couldn't support something like BFM Paris.

In any case, you can only estimate how much appetite there is for something on television once you offer it on the market. In 1979, there was absolutely no demand for an all-news TV channel. Then, a year later, CNN was launched -- and the rest is history.

I think the mistake that was made in setting up these channels was they were made too small in general, London Live being the obvious exception, but even they screwed up badly, by not utitlising the resources of the Evening Standard. Most local news services in the US have populations comparable with ITV regions, some of which happened to be individual cities.

If they were to truly learn a lesson from this, it would be to create bigger local stations covering larger areas. Sadly, the chances of this actually happening are somewhere around 0%. Local TV has generally been written off as a failure, and in my view, it was predominantly a failure of scale, rather than a failure of the concept itself.

You'd end up with ITV/BBC sized regions. Anyway the towns and cites selected were in part governed by the availability of spare frequencies to support a local mux. There were not (and certainly won't be now owing to 700 MHz clearance) enough frequencies (and/or power levels) to support larger areas (unless you force the PSB muxes to carry the local services)

Well, there's a reason why those regions are the size they are. They are very much a size that is sustainable for a TV channel. A lot of smaller local TV stations in US states exist is regional or statewide networks, because that is more sustainable than trying to be hyper local to your town, city or local area.

It is what it is.

That is embarrassing. Isn't that less in a whole week than they used to do in one day? And they've ditched a few of their shows it seems like the film one (or has it become just a kids one now?) but I see the TV one and Go are still running for now. I do find it odd they are showing films like American Psycho and Mulholland Drive.

The film show finished in December, Go is still going apparently.

Jim Grice, the head of news and current affairs, left last month:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-grice/

Part of the cutbacks? Almost pointless him being there at all now anyway, to be honest.

London Live are rebranding their 6pm weekday show as 'London Focus' from tomorrow (according to their listings). Described as 'news, weather, events and the best of London's cultural scene'.

Rearranging the deck chairs.....

Did anyone catch the 'new' bulletin? I doubt it consider how it clashes with the more watched ITV bulletin.

Sadly, yes I did sit through it. Having not watched any of their output for more than a year, I didn’t think it was possible for it to be worse than I remembered.

Basically the first 15 minutes was news - no live reports, but they did have clips from the London Labour rebels. The few packages they had were the ‘anonymous’ kind (ie just the interviewee talking).

The 2nd 15 minutes consisted of another anonymous package (about women in the Met) and two studio interviews which were arts related.

Although the overall story count was the highest of all 3 local bulletins last night - the lack of resources overall made it a difficult watch.