Local TV

Now you mention it, Manchester Arena is in the catchment area for so many of the cities covered by Made - I didn't even consider this, but they also refer to the fact during the networked broadcast. Hence the reason they made so much effort I guess.

Calendar and Tyne Tees were also live from Manchester as well, so made sense for Made to do so.

#BirminghamNews had a report on a vigil in Birmingham City Centre as their lead story.

The best thing that could happen for 'That's' stations is they take over Made or they are taken over by Made which will probably happen at some stage. People may not like the idea of the former, but if they take the production talent and ideas from the likes of Chris James from Made they'd be onto a winner.

With the exception of North Wales, Made have sensibly got a selection of licences in major metropolitan cities which have a viable population for them to market to advertisers.

That's on the other hand have a selection of small towns which will be much harder to market, plus Manchester through acquisition

If That's are losing money once they've launched all of their channels, Manchester is the one they'd need to sell to keep the smaller channels on-air, which is where Made could snap up.

Other licences worth snapping up not owned by That's TV IMHO are London, Nottingham, Norwich, Swansea, Sheffield, Brighton and Tonbridge/Maidstone.

It's all following (but in much less time) the same path of local commercial radio.

Local broadcasting (without significant programming and resource sharing) is unsustainable.

From what I've seen of That's Hampshire so far, it's just a 8-10 min loop of local stories, easy copy, press
releases turned into reports by adding vox pops etc, and often the same members of the public who have appeared in other vox pops !, non controversial council announcements, and nothing remotely 'investigative'. It's only updated at 7am and 7pm. Oh and no schedule at all on the EPG, making it impossible to record on a PVR (not that you would anyway !)

When you actually look at the details, the Clywd (North Wales) licence makes perfect sense. The station is effectively a sub-region of Liverpool and run from there (only 20 miles away). The 30 minutes of Welsh programming per week required for the North Wales licence is made at Made in Cardiff and produced/narrated by their Welsh speaking station manager Daniel Glyn. A Welsh language programme sits nicely on the Cardiff schedules too, politically if nothing else.

The resourcefulness of the whole Made operation is what I admire most and the above is a shining example of that.

Absolutely, it'd be a licence that would be unviable otherwise.

I don't think I've ever witnessed anything so amateur in all my life. It's blatantly obvious that the bulletins are pre-recorded. The reporters sound so incredibly boring., one report went out absolutely silent, and the presenter keeps telling people to go online for more information, even though their website isn't online.

An absolute joke.

For anyone interested however...

I think some members of this forum could do a better job at the graphics (and even running a damn news bulletin) than that. Absolutely atrocious.

The sound of someone who's never seen Sheffield Live at their best Did That's Hampshire manage to stay on air throughout their first bulletin? If so, they're one-up on SLTV!

That said, the way things have turned out, I'm wondering if SLTV have got the right idea (badly implemented) of running it as a community station rather than a commercial enterprise.

I assume that it's some kind of premade template anyway.

To be fair 'That's' Beth Excell's Manchester Bombing special was a solid bulletin it's just the look that lets it down.