[Brekkie]

Just thought it's worth looking at the ones that show local TV can be local.    Notts TV viewers have local content throughout the day with just a couple of acquisitions by the looks of it, including Walks around Britain:

nottstv.com 

It's the same in Kent too.

www.kentonline.co.uk 


London Live relies more on acquisitions and I think their hour of news (at the same time as the BBC/ITV news) is their only regularly produced local content, but probably thanks to being able to acquire London centric content it still looks relatively local, though falls short of the 18.5 hours of local news required per week with just an hour on weekdays at 6pm and an hour on weekends at 6am (which I guess takes content from the weekday editions and probably isn't live).

www.londonlive.co.uk 


I think Brighton, Belfast and Sheffield are the only other independent local stations, though IIRC Sheffield was largely a simulcast of a radio station and pretty poor.


Personally I think as a minimum these stations should have to run a two hour block of local content on weeknight evenings which includes 30 minutes of news and ideally 30 minute first run local non-news content too - though probably not every single night.   That block can then be repeated once or twice during the evening, and then ideally they'd be a similar block at weekends but that could just be repeat programming rather than news.

The frustrating thing too is even with just a half hour commitment to local non-news content had these stations been run that way over the last few years they'd now have a fairly decent of archive local content to flesh out the schedule with.