London Live

Nice EPG positions, though.

I wonder how much money they could have saved if they didn't go after this fancy robot for one of their cameras. I imagine they could have bought one or two Vinten Radamec or Shotoku units for the cost of this robot.

I'd be less worried about putting Vinten or similar peds in, and more concerned with putting decent cameras in. DSLRs are a joke in a studio. A decent cheap 2/3" HD camera would have been a much better bet.

Oh - and they could have done with hiring an LD for a day or two rather than a DoP...

At least though they invested in technology rather than exploiting a student cameraman under the promise of useful work experience.

Reading ESTV's accounts is like watching one of the early travel reports by Vanessa Baffoe - it just doesn't make sense.

Turnover was up 217% to £2.6 m. Audience was up 24% to 2.3 million per month.

Average salaries were down 9% to £42k pa, though staff numbers were up from 49 to 62. No hardship for Kirkman though, his own salary went up 9% to £250k pa.

The more worrying thing however, for a ''sustainable business model' is the company has £20m in debt (loans to the Lebedev's) due for repayment in 2016,17 & 18. Where that money's coming from is anyone's guess.

I read that as an increase in advertising revenue due to an increase in viewers - with the latter most likely a result of replacing home-grown output with films and repeats of popular shows.

The only realistic programming model with that works for local tv....
100% in-house productions are expensive and typically not viewer friendly or have mass appeal or popularity. If increase in ad revenue is true, its actually yielding some positive results for LL. Now if they can just work on their news component.....once they get some positive cashflow from the mass appeal shows and movies, then they can work on creating a hand full of local productions. Thats the smart way to make local tv.

They bought Channel 5.

I think what made C5 a viable proposition is that Dirty Des turned it around into a profitable company with a target audience that matches Viacom's sister brands.

London Live on the other hand is akin to a small scale cheap repeats channel with larger news requirements than Channel 5 has. Although it has more of a focus than at launch, it still doesn't strike me as a clear proposition for a mainstream broadcasting company.

Yeah an unprofitable, failing local channel with a small reach really can't be compared to a profitable, multichannel, national broadcaster available to tens of millions...

That's very interesting. Clearly the big name movies and shows etc are having an effect which is good so credit where it's due although that's not really what local TV is about. On wages, I would be amazed if there are many people there earning more than anything around the low to mid £20K mark. I also assume the staffing figures also includes freelancers/fixed term contract people? I tuned in the other day for a bit and the content is looking better but the quality of it is still below par if that makes any sense? Not sure how they're doing the maths on the figures as in May last year they claimed to have 2.5 million so either the audience is fluctuating by quite a large margin on a regular basis or the figures aren't right. Also, in the Guardian last October, they are having a 100% year on year growth in audience and revenue so that audience figure seems like a curious claim. I see weekly reach remains fairly static around 0.09% too.