So the final licence was awarded today for Blackpool and Preston, won by YourTV, who also won the Manchester bid. The alarm bells should surely already be ringing there.
Considering they went to the effort of interviewing all 19 licences you'd think they'd know which channel these were going to be shown on.
Nothing too revealing there - basically they're all going for the fairly traditional model and hoping to recoup their expected early losses in later years. Interesting though they say they're exempt from the maximum number of ads quota so can and will run more ads than the national channels.
Will the Sky 117 slot be used for all local channels willing to pay for transponder space, or will it be used nationally by London Live?
117 I beleive has been earmarked for the local channels so I imagine the former. It will be interesting to see which broadcasters do on Sky though, I would have thought it'll be difficult for most unless they get special rates of some kind. Hope they're not encrypted anyway (which I doubt they would be), as it's going to be really excited tuning all the different channels in to ones Sky box.
Ofcom is now opening up applications for local TV channels in
Bangor,
Cambridge,
Middlesbrough,
Mold,
Scarborough,
Swansea and
York.
It's also noted that they have proposed a consolidation of four areas into two for a potential third phase
Tonbridge is now paired with Maidstone for a single service, as are Hereford and Gloucester