That's pretty shocking stuff. I think some of the allegations of exploitative working practices ought to be looked into by HMRC too - I think there are probably some breaches of minimum wage law there.
FORMER THAT'S TV EMPLOYEE HERE. Well, intern. Unpaid intern. For a whole year. I cannot tell you how long I have been waiting for this all to come out because the amount of times our stories have been shrugged off as part of the industry is very upsetting.https://t.co/ISvgNcupJB
You could tell it was awful from the output, but I didn't realise it got to the state claimed in the article:
Quote:
“We had a station go down to just one person. The girl who was stationed there for a month was due for a meeting with the BBC. She said, ‘I'm really sorry,
I can’t make it because there'll be no one to run the channel.
’
Worth checking out Twitter for some of the stories from former That's TV employees. One was given an one years internship unpaid with no expenses. The presenter ended up working in a bar after doing long shifts and ended up in hospital as they lived in poverty.
Another was let go after a week as she refused to move to work at That's North Yorkshire.
The sad thing is, it was all so predictable as well.
Anyone who knows anything about local commercial media knows it's a tough fight for survival these days with ad revenues and audiences under massive pressures, even for long-established operators.
Local TV was never going to get the budgets needed to make anything half decent that anyone would want to watch or advertise around. There's simply not the money in local advertising pots to make decent services viable long-term, particularly once the licence fee subsidies dry up.
P*ss-poor programming made on an almost non-existant budget was always the inevitability.
Everyone in the industry knew this and said this at the time but still this ludicrous project went ahead. I think it's genuinely frightening that the man ultimately responsible for this utter mess now running our National Health Service.
When you consider how much the BBC has had to pay towards this, including infrastructure costs, it is a scandal.
In online and audio energy and creativity can make up for a lack of budget, but on TV it can’t. You have to have the budgets and the people to make it work. The early days of multi-channel in the 1990s showed that the public can’t take to low budget TV.
Many of the new That’s TV stations lean on two basic elements: a single local news bulletin on repeat for half the schedule, and old, non-copyrighted, often black and white films to fill the other half.
A That’s TV station would record a 30-minute news bulletin at 6pm, made up of anywhere between two and four two local stories, and several others from around the That’s TV network. At 6:30pm the staff at the station – often just a newsreader and an autocue operator – would record the entire bulletin again with slightly different wording, in an effort to make out that it was a different bulletin.
From 7pm until midday the next day, the twice-recorded news bulletins would run on loop, over and over. At midday, the old films would kick in and run through till that evening’s news bulletin.
This should be a regulatory issue. None of the licences were awarded against such low value & quality thresholds. With every request to revise a licence, Ofcom has rolled over completely. Some of the rewrites on the licence applications are laughable, with whole swathes of commitments crossed out and rewritten (see case in point for That's Norfolk below).
Ofcom just say it doesn't fundamentally change the character of the service, yet with every revision waived through the regulator themselves lower the bar for these services even further.
The latest change appears to have been for Swansea Bay TV. Where they are getting their 10 hours of first run local programming AND 16 hours 15 minutes of news a week is anyone's guess. Especially when the news appears to be the only local output.
That's Swansea Bay, like the other stations has the same mix of old films and repeated news block.