Local TV

That actually almost looks like a professional website for a respectable media company. At least Made TV tried at least, but then again next to That's TV anything looks pretty decent. The last year really should have been the making of these networks, but they'd already lost their USP by then.

Pity the lead article on the Birmingham one says "Lockdown coming to an end on Wednesday", which sort of confused me a bit because I can't find any other outlet reporting that. It turns out that article was published November 30th so its actually "only" one lockdown behind. Brilliant!

As to the USP - yeah, that horse sort of bolted in the Big Centre TV days. Or maybe before that. I don't really know, because like everybody else I wasn't watching (aside from the first night).

Oh goodness, Big City TV. A vanity project more common with radio anoraks.

Have some of the ex Made stations had another revamp? I notice ‘Bristol TV’ on Facebook appears to have a new logo which is ‘Local TV Bristol’ and the website is ‘Bristollocal.tv’ which links to a Wordpress account which asks for a password.

From the previous page of this thread...

Wouldn’t they have been better ‘doing an ITV’ and calling it ‘LTV Birmingham’ ‘LTV Bristol’ etc...

The name is the least of the issues with these services.
The main issue is that the concept was based on the Local TV services in the US but where its all fallen down is that we don't have the population to sustain that model. The state of Texas to pick a random example has a population of near enough 30 million on its own. It can support local TV. We only have a population of about 65 million for the entire country. The population of the Bristol urban area alone is just over one million.

Completely different markets with different history but Texas is split into over 20 TV markets with multiple local channels in many markets. The trouble is the theory never thought about the practicalities and the funding and regulation wasn't there to ensure they served their purpose.

The licence fee money siphoned off for these would have been better spent to create a fund for non-news regional content that the BBC and ITV could have access too. Think the viewer and the industry would have benefitted more from just one 6x30min series per region per year than numerous so called 24/7 local stations.

The whole ‘Local TV’ thing originally proposed by Jeremy Hunt was to have a National network with local opt-outs which was a far better idea. It was an answer to ITV’s 2008 cuts to Regional News which have now been partly reversed. ITV had previously made it clear they didn’t want any Licence Fee funding or someone producing content using LF monies on their channel. Talking of non-News content ITV were to produce a weekly Regional Political show as part of their 2008 proposal called ‘Here And Now’ which never happened...

The blame lies with Ofcom’s watering down of the Local TV idea and their over the top reduction of ITV’s Regional obligations. A reduction to the original 11 English Regions (London, Meridian, Westcountry, West, Central West, Central East (two bulletins for Central as the only true Dual Region), Anglia, Granada, Yorkshire, Tyne Tees & last of all Border*) would have worked better in my opinion. Oh and ‘Here And Now’ (or weekly editions of Central Lobby etc) should have been mandatory. As for the BBC they surely have enough money off the people to produce some Regional content?

* Or Border Scotland moves to STV with Border England merging with Tyne Tees (as they did anyway).

Surely a better comparison is with somewhere like Austin, rather than Texas?

Indeed. It's the size of the market of the station that's going to matter. Not the market plus the remainder of the country or state that can't receive that station anyway!

Problem here is we skipped the network part of the American Network/Affiliate model.

Without the high spending bright lights of a network with a budget that reflects the single digit EPG number all you've got is a poor attempt at local news.

I still think that something could be salvaged from this mess if the local TV franchisees jointly put out their entire 1900-2300 primetime block to a competitive tender for a general entertainment service with guarantees that programme spending on that block would meet a threshold of an amount I do not have the skill or knowledge to define myself!

And little incentive to improve local content when they just simulcast an American channel for most of the day.