STV to shut STV2 Local Stations

Was STV2 a little too much like STV, in terms of content? I'm thinking, STV2 could've been used to create informative programming, with a possible view to selling to ITV for use on ITV2 or 3, or even ITV itself. In this case, I'm thinking about a wildlife programme. Anglia TV made Survival. There hasn't been anything like it on ITV for years. Perhaps STV could've made a small series looking at wildlife, trying to make STV2 different.

As an aside, last year, with ITV having the horse racing contract, STV2 was able to show some evening racing, I recall a meeting at Ayr being on STV2. Clearly, unless STV can opt out on the main channel to show it, that won't happen now.

Was there this much of a backlash when just over 50 staff were made redundant back in 2006?

No, the last STV strike was back in Red era and a manager from STV had to read the news for 5mins then I think Passport quiz was put out for the other 25mins at 18.05.

The thing was there streamlined the operations to a single presenter for both north and central, merged many roles to cover both areas, it was to get ready for "STV news" and the opt outs.

Thanks for this, really interesting, especially the page with some rare shares for the ITV local news. A very impressive 40% for Border.

The production side of the business does very badly and their London team is in desperate need of a refresh. It’s good that they’ll be investing STV2 money into making it more of a format factory.

The STV Player part is interesting. It’s going to be hard to make the pay service attractive when they’ve only got one channel’s worth of content. I can imagine attracting younger viewers is tricky when they havent got access to stuff like ITV2 and ITV Be shows.

Is the STV Player on Freeview Play, Sky and Virgin?

This is the archived link to a previous second STV channel venture, Sky Scottish, which I've mentioned already.

https://web.archive.org/web/19980207091637/http://www.skyscottish.co.uk/

At the time of closure, after just 18 months, the Managing director of SMG said it was a valuable learning experience. Their finance director admitted it had been hard to build up a Scottish audience outside Scotland.

That said, what lessons do you think STV learned from Sky Scottish, and also S2, which was a previous incarnation of STV2, in putting what became STV2 together?

I think any lessons learned would not necessarily be relevant now anyway, given the huge changes in technology since those channels were on-air. Perhaps the major thing to take away from those launches and STV2 would be not to launch a second channel!

you can't say that look at ITV2, BBC2, E4, 5*, Sky er?? Quest Red.. The lesson is to create a second channel with a purpose, if you dont have one as you say don't launch it.

Well, for STV, they've tried three times now to launch a second channel and all have been a failure. It's all well and good to launch a second channel, and even have a purpose for it, but at the end of the day if it doesn't make money it's not worth it to them. Of course, ITV2, BBC2, E4 etc., are all successful, but all also have the advantage of having national broadcasters behind them; STV, whilst big in Scotland, is a relative minnow in the broadcasting landscape. That and the drive to fill the channel(s) with Scottish content - enforced in some respects for STV2 - when a channel full of said content clearly isn't a big draw, certainly didn't help matters. It's worthy yes, and no doubt Scots want to see their nation represented on TV, but clearly not to the extent that you could fill a whole channel with it. The BBC may have a better shot, given the larger budget it will have, but again, I think the ratings will be on the low side. I however could be wrong and if I am, I am willing to admit that!

I think the problem here is not so much the news, but how it's been handled.

It's not a surprise to anyone that STV2 is being closed, I think everyone could see the writing on the wall. There's an argument that STV has been pissing cash up against a wall in many respects over the years, doing a lot of things it frankly doesn't have to do. They didn't have to splurge on local TV, they didn't have to do separate shows from Glasgow and Edinburgh, they don't have to do a nightly politics show.

All the while, it feels like they overstretch themselves and what you end up with is bland web content you could get anywhere else. I'll never understand why, for example, STV's tweetouts relate to UK-wide stories that are already on the BBC.

However, there is a real sense of a sledgehammer to crack a nut in this announcement. A pile of bad news all at once, seemingly without any consultation.

If things become a little more realistic, with STV News focusing on providing exclusive content within its own patch and taking advantage of the pressure put on national broadcasters to commission programming from the nations and regions, it is setting itself up for a more solid future.

However, I am very cynical of press releases that announce this sort of thing and then bury the bad news in paragraph four. I've seen it too often in newspapers. If they've come up with a pile of platitudes to distract people from the bad news, and then don't bother investing or essentially do a UTV and just rebroadcast ITV, then it's a matter of time until the game's up.

I just can't see Scotland tonight going any time soon. It does well in the rating and killed off the bbc programme... How often does that happen. Late show with ewan on a Friday would also tick boxes and leave 8pm slot on Mondays and fridays.

It will be interesting to see if football show comes back in September or if live at five is repackaged into 8pm hour long programme to help full its quotes.

The rebrand is for STV Productions, not the whole of STV.

I was quite annoyed at this, especially at the loss of STV News Tonight, but other than that, STV 2 has shown nothing but repeats and cheap programmes since its launch. The STV City channels were far better and STV Glasgow broke even a year or so after launch. STV 2 was a disaster. It tried to be local, but was a half arsed national channel instead.

I like the ideas laid out going forward. Hopefully, there’ll be better quality homegrown programmes going forward, instead of many cheap programmes as was on STV 2.