ITV fail to meet out-of-London quota for networked programs

There are many complaints that only %5 is of programmers made in Scotland but back in the good old day 8% was made in scotland,

Was last night's Scotsport the last?

last for Football i believe But the brand stays on for other sporting use's like Rugby, or um anyone got any ideas?

Not really comparable, all the ARD broadcasters are state-owned (either by one of the German states or a combination thereof) and dual-funded by licence fee and advertising. ARD itself is an association owned jointly by the broadcasters that make it up.

Think the BBC, but with the structure of the old ITV Network (if that makes sense).

Not necessarily. As I said a few posts above, each regional company could have planned its own strategy for providing both online and broadcast promotional and communications solutions to businesses in their area and thus kept a healthy, if not unrealistically astronomical, income on a regular basis.

It's not as if the only way to do this was to remove regulation in terms of relaxation of takeover restrictions and regional production quotae; the other way would have been to provide more relevant and more useful services to local clients to fund the business - and the only way to do this would have been to each seek to be at the top of their game in their region, and become powerhouses of media production and communications services. However this obviously needed a degree of effort that none of the companies saw fit to invest in, especially as the regulatory framework that would have protected their investments from commercial predators was being pulled apart around them.

Also - this so-called "new" idea that BBC THREE have (and don't seem to implement very well) of interweaving 'user generated'/online-submitted content and broadcast media could have been implemented by the regional ITV companies, themselves 10 years ago probably even playing a major role in educating people as to what this new world offered (because many people in 1997 would have heard of the internet but never used it) and be seen as leading the bandwagon rather than jumping on it. They themselves could have paved the way for television advertising of internet services before they could reach as many people online themselves, and the ITV companies could have placed themselves at the forefront of providing a regional online/broadcast presence with a genuine 'user interaction' feel. A more modern version of the 1970s/80s practice of the continuity announcer reading out birthdays and details of local events. The same thing could have happened but with e-Mails, or messages phoned in, or texted in, and read out by a professional announcer who is able to get that message heard in an authoritative way; something that would have 10 times more impact than whatever text simply scrolled on the screen as a ticker.

Proof that this idea works is when you see news channels reading out viewer's e-Mails, or showing camera-phone video clips. That's the sort of thing the ITV companies could have been demonstrating, promoting to their local audiences and in the longer-term, using on-screen.

This would have led the way to a mass perception (both in terms of the public and the advertising world) that the internet and television could be dancing partners and not a pair of warring martial artists.

I agree that the 1990 Broadcasting Act made would make this a pretty tough ask, but if the companies had lobbied for protection in their investments from takeover they could, think about this, maybe have pressured the Labour government into coming up with another Broadcasting Act to bring in a bit more control again. It's only because New Labour was Old Tory in a red cape that such an opportunity was never there for the chasing.

New Zealand has Ch.9 which are fully digital and are regional.

Forgive my ignorance, but is Ch9 commercial or a funded by a licence fee (or equivalent)?