STV awarded local TV licences for Glasgow and Edinburgh

Somewhat bizarrely, the SNP appears to be saying that the money should have gone to BBC Scotland. The very organisation a number of their members protest outside, arguing about how biased it is against their cause:

Scottish Government News.

My personal ideal is for a US-style network/affiliate set up and feel it's a bit sad that UK broadcasting never properly went down that route and what did somewhat resemble it (regional ITV and billingual S4C) got phased out. Really, I think, outside of a wholesale reorganisation of broadcasting culture in this country, the only way we could ever get anything like decent local TV would be for the BBC to provide it via more localised opt outs: something we'd have to pay for via the license fee.

For local TV to work, there needs to be the demand for it, and at present, the only people wanting it are government luvvies and media barons.

This country is not big enough for the American system to work.

That's because BBC Scotland is 'national'. Nationalists by their nature (and not necessarily just the Scottish variety) generally want their territory considered whole as well as not being a part of any greater area. So, whilst the SNP would ideally like no pan-UK broadcasting (at least any that includes Scotland), I well imagine that they have little time for an intra-Scottish regional stuff either. I certainly don't remember the SNP being particularly upset over northern Grampian meeting its maker at the hands of Central Belt STV but you can bet your life that if ITVplc ever aquire STV and remove the branding (and much of the programmes) then you can bet your life they'll be rather miffed about it.

Not that we're getting 'the American system' of course

No, but people keep saying how much better our TV would be if it was a direct copy of the American set up.

By 'people' do you mean cityprod?

I don't really buy the size argument. It's not really a size dependent system. The ITV system was essentially just a larger version of it in a smaller country with some obvious differences, of course. The reason TV developed differently over there was due to cultural/political and not necessarily geographic reasons which resulted in a 'bottom up' approach rather than a centralised strategy.

As for local TV and there being no demand, I'm sure it depends on what the programmes are. For a start, local TV isn't a genre in itself and ultimately falls into the same categories as nationwide or networked TV - news, soap, sport, drama etc. Surely people would watch good local TV and not bad local TV. Of course, what's good and what's bad is ultimately determined by personal taste.

Naturally, you could argue that most genres are adequately catered for by London-based nationwide output and I would say that's true for the most part, with local news provision being the main need for any local or regional TV service. That said, it should be remembered that Coronation Street and Emmerdale are ITV's two staple programmes that it arranges its prime time schedules around and that these programmes are a product of the old regional network system. I'm quite confident that if ITV was a London-based UK-wide channel from Day One, then neither of these shows would exist, nor anything like them.

They would be better brands IMO. These two though have a better chance of succeeding by having that link to STV and access to their new shows and archives to fill out the schedules a bit, though I suspect bar news and the odd flagship show the two channels will practically share the same schedule.

Worth noting to on the schedules posted on the OFCOM website they're only planning an evening service - 5pm-10pm in Glasgow and 6pm-10pm in Edinburgh - and to be fair they go for different strategies with Glasgow having hourly 15 minute news bulletins then 45 minute shows filling the rest of the hour, while Edinburgh goes for 30 minutes of news then 30 minutes of programmes most hours.

This reminds me of Sky Scottish in a way, however this will be based in Scotland for viewers in Scotland...

I didn't appreciate that indicative Edinburgh and Glasgow schedules were available. I don't really know quite what to say after looking at those. I really don't think the demand for news is as high as is being suggested - esp when you will have STV News at 6 against GTV News at 6 (and ETV to a lesser extent).

In fact those PDFs might be a load of rubbish - why would you put Saturday sport on one and not the other? I guess there's probably more bowling greens and pub darts contests in Glasgow.

PILE OF CRAP, This is what Local TV is suppose to be? its awful, I could come up with better ideas than that! Radio stations are having bad enough job trying to do that kind of stuff. Passport Quiz would do wonders for one of those slots.

I think Local TV stations should all be scraped and the money spent on the actually programme going out at Fixed time slots 3-4pm weekdays. 7.30 Tuesday and Thursday. 10.30pm Wednesday, and Thursdays.

Do we know what the other companies were offering?