10 to 20 local TV stations will be licensed by 2015

Local media ownership rules to go by November

Coalition sets out media plans, giving 2012 as date for communications bill, licence fee deal and local TV licences

The coalition government is planning to scrap local cross-media ownership rules by November and introduce a new communications bill to parliament in late 2012.

Other features of the government's plans for the media and technology sectors, unveiled by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport today, include pushing back the Labour administration's promise of universal 2mbps broadband from 2012 to 2015.

Licensing for a new generation of local TV stations would begin by the summer of 2012, the department said, and it would conclude negotiations for a new BBC licence fee settlement by that April.

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I wonder if these will do as well as the last 20 local TV channels?

Where's the bandwidth coming from too?

I'm sure there's plenty of odd gaps here and there for local stations, there were in the analogue realm so there should be in digital too... more maybe as digital transmissions interfere with each other less

The coalition of the incompetent strikes again!

And where is the money? They should be concentrating on protecting the existing regional networks not playing around trying to launch new ones.

This is bizarre. I can't name any succesful regional stations in the UK apart from Channel M, and even that's almost gone now. Channel One had big plans donkeys years ago for local, VJ-shot news with stations in Bristol, Manchester (or was it Liverpool?) and Birmingham. Came to very little in the end ISTR. Six TV (Oxford and Southampton) and Solent TV are other exampes of recent closures of local RSL tv stations.

Channel One Liverpool was the sole survivor and lasted longer than the rest, although Channel One, along with the local versions of Live TV were cable only. Channel M is the only survivor and that's probably partially to do with it being on Sky.

The main problem with the RSLs were that the signals were too weak and they often came from a transmitter on a different site to the regular channels meaning that even if someone had heard if a station and wanted to view it they might have to invest in a different aerial. The potential viewership was very small.

Doing the same again in the digital realm might be better, as long as they learn from past mistakes. they need to allocate them to major conurbations and make them easy to receive, co-siting their transmitter with the existing multiplexes. Guaranteeing them Sky and cable access would also help

It was a Tory election manifesto pledge, an alternative to the Independent News Consortium plan for ITV. the idea is to let local newspaper and other media groups to expand into TV

The argument seemed to be 'Birmingham Alabama has 6 local TV stations, Birmingham UK has none'... ignoring the fact that the US TV setup is very different and all TV stations there are local

The first ones won't be licensed for another 2 years, by which time - hopefully - the economy would have improved. However by then won't starting new local broadcast TV channel seem a little old hat?