ITV - Cutbacks & Proposed merger

There was also another local channel back in 2007 called MKTV (Milton Keynes TV) Whilst most of it was filler, there was a breakfast news programme and an early evening news programme. Unfortunately the budget didn't stretch more than 3 months and despite calls from the owner saying that it was looking for more investment and would come back bigger, better than before... it never saw the light of day.

The frequency on Sky has been taken over by Clubland TV.

I think to run a successful Local TV Service, you do need a big-ish company to run the service. In Channel M's case it's owned by the Guardian Media Group, who run 3 Radio stations from the City and they use the Manchester Evening News (that they own) as the main source for their News output.

I see on Digital Spy someone has noticed that STV has dropped Lewis from Sunday night and are showing 'Highlands Special' and 'Scotland at the Movies'.

Article mentioned: http://deadlinescotland.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/new-scots-tv-on-stv-727/

Here is a list of Programmes that have been giving the BOOT in scotland!

Dexter: season 2
Championship english football: matches and highlights:
Al Murry
Moving wallpaper
Lewis
Alan titchmarsh show

any others I dare say yes!

Oh come on surely Lewis is a hit in Scotland too??

I would have thought a gingerish psycotic serial killer would be ideal for the market. Or did the Neds think it was a reality show?

As sprungli_bob pointed out, the ITV Local site is to close down tomorrow morning.

Out of all that I can understand why they've dropped The Championship, probably not very appealing to the STV audience. But I think they're silly to drop the rest, especially Lewis, considering how well that does for ITV anyway.

It is interesting that STV are taking a more independent stance on scheduling. It's something that all ITV companies used to do, in the days when they were independent. STV, for instance, screened Crossroads at around 5.20, rather than 6.35...Thames actually dropped the soap from their schedules for a time. The irony, for viewers in the South of Scotland, is that, despite "Border Scotland" still existing on satellite, on analogue from Caldbeck and its Scottish relays, (digital there from switchover) and digitally from Selkirk and its relays, the only time there's any variation from the "main" ITV schedule is when a Scottish club is in Champions League action, so any extra Scottish programming is being denied to a quarter of a million people in their own country. That on top of a so-called "local" news service that is now a complete farce.

Actually, there should have been a holding page from Monday morning IIRC.

itvlocal.com now redirects to itv.com/local and a page showing all the regional news presenters appears

It's good that they are going to retain some sort of regional website

The ongoing saga of ITV's regional websites continues, there's been lots of different incarnations now...

I've just clicked on Granada, and on their page they have 90 second update of today's News headlines, even though the video on the page said click here for Behind the Scenes, so fair play to them if they're retaining some form of content. Although it's long overdue for ITV Local to be integrated with the main ITV.com site.

I've noticed ITV S4/C Local Cymru (whatever it's called), is still online in the style of ITV Local.