[chinamug]

It was tried, twice during the 1990s, once as an experiment during Six One and once during the Friday edition of Nationwide.They were never able to make it work in the past, largely because of cable (and in those days MMDS) customers being fed from transmitters that weren’t local to them. Nowadays Sky would be an issue too and there’d be no appetite too uplink multiple versions. (It might be technically difficult to do - the Sky CAS was put in place before postcodes were introduced in ROI, and I *think* it sees ROI as one giant UK postcode).

Additionally, ILR sees local as being “its” territory - I’ve posted before about stations effectively basing themselves on having local exclusivity on being local - as opposed to the “Dublin bias” (that doesn’t really exist, but it suits them to big it up) of RTE.

On the VMTV thing, my comment was really intended as dig at the daily ten hours (that is not an exaggeration, as one look at the schedules will attest) of The Chase, rather than to suggest that VMTV didn’t broadcast news!

They actually tried a good few times. They had Munster Matters in the 1970's which was a half hour show that only went out in the Southern Transmitters. In the 1980's as part of their 25 year celebrations they had regional television in the afternoon (which was almost entirely made up of repeats) and as Rdd says they tried again in the 1990's. There really isn't a need for it as such, the population is only 5 million today and when they were doing it 30 years ago we barely had 4 million. Most things of interest news wise would be of interest to all.

There were private local stations on cable and pirate TV local stations, but modern communication and social media have basically meant any content that would have shown up on those outlets has now moved online.

As for the Chase, they've cut back greatly since a few years ago when they seemed to have close to 18 hours on some days. With omnibus editions at the weekends in case you missed an episode.