London Live

ESTV (London Live) has published their latest set of accounts for the year ending September 2019.

Turnover down for the second consecutive year to £2.4m (from £3.1m), but losses also down to £2.8m (from £3.2m).

Staff numbers down by 40% to 35.

Good news for the man in charge - the highest paid Director (Tim Kirkman?) had his salary increased by £34k to an eye-watering £302k or 19% of the total salary bill.

Do we think London Live will ever restore its news output?

They aren't even showing 'news' in the early hours any more, it seems.

They pulled everything described as ‘news’ back in March and have been in breach of their programme commitments ever since, but I doubt London Live or Ofcom give a s#*t.

The only advantage is that LL haven't sold to That's TV. The debt pile must be too large for Dan Cass and co to take on.

At one point they were showing repeats of the government press conferences in the early hours so they could claim to have some news output

I assume That's, with just 15 minutes of news, is also in breach of their commitments? You're right, Ofcom don't seem bothered.

That’s correct - they ran for a few weeks at 3.30 in the morning.

I’d like to see them try news again, perhaps even re-launch the channel in the Autumn (it certainly needs it) - but I’m not holding my breath.

It's light touch regulation from Ofcom during the pandemic. So I don't suppose there is any appetite to regulate any Local TV station for reduction of licence commitments during these times.

To be fair to London Live at least they still show programming - it may be repeats and probably doesn't always fall in the London remit but it seems comparable enough with other digital channels and is better than a simulcast of another channel for a large chunk of the day or cheap three week old news on a loop 24/7.

I agree with that, but ultimately they have a licence based on a promise to produce local programming which they’re simply not doing.

If there was a demand for the news product, LL would still be producing 35 hours a week of it. Viewers here are satisfied with the 6pm/6.30 ITV/BBC bulletins which is more than enough for most.

When nobody is interested in acquiring London Live with their debt, the highly placed LCN on Freeview and their SD slot on Freeview, it's got nowhere to go apart from showing old repeats and films which is their saving grace compared to the other local stations which earn revenue from simulcasting home shopping or other Freeview channels with a lower LCN slot.

I think there is demand for a decent local news alternative to the BBC and ITV offerings - one problem with the most recent incarnation of London Live News was that it wasn’t …. news I mean.

The hour-long 6pm bulletin was 15 minutes actual news, followed by lengthy studio interviews covering the arts. There was no late night or weekend news - just repeats of the weekday arts interviews.

2 years before - the weekend bulletins were regularly making it into their Top 10 and even the 5pm weekday bulletin made an appearance now and then. Both were cut at the end of 2018.

The only ‘live’ bulletin left before lockdown was scheduled directly against two long established and better resourced products.

A solution could be something like the original Channel 5 service - hourly headline updates with a half-hour programme in primetime, say 7 or even 8pm.

Style-wise for the hourly updates - they could do worse than mimic LBC News’ top of the hour sequence.