[mouseboy33]

Well this just seems to be more of co-branding exercise in favour of TalkTV more than anything for the LocalTV stations. Would be nice they could help handle the advertising sales for the Local stations. (But who knows....im very suspicious when it comes to anything associated with Murdoch). The Murdoch empire could have a helped create a national spine for the network (Which would have to include a strand of re-runs and imports and films) which would supplement an actual local news operation and maybe a local magazine-type show). But probably only the bigger cities initially would be target markets. And considered Murdoch's overseeing the launch the Fox Local stations back in the 80s, it would have been interesting. But alas I dont think they are really that interested in replicating the success of the FOX network in UK. But the branding of TalkTV for their local stations....eh.

[Spencer]

Think Notts TV and KMTV in Kent are about the only ones that come anywhere near close to providing what was envisaged initially for local TV.

NVTV in Belfast looks like it still has some limited local programming but no news bulletins at all.

Surprisingly the much derided Sheffield Live still appears to be going strong too with a mostly local schedule.

[Orry Verducci]

The real problem with local TV is that running TV channels, especially ones on the DTT platform, is expensive.

For most channels those costs are recovered by the ad revenue, but the local channels on their own simply don't have the coverage to bring in sufficient ad revenue to cover the costs, apart from maybe the ones covering the biggest cities. Which means they also can't afford the programming that will bring in the viewers, so ad revenue falls further. It's a vicious circle.

The whole business model, as originally intended, simply doesn't work. Which is why most of them have moved to form quasi-national channels, which works better in terms of ad sales and revenue.

For the local channels to work in the way the government originally wanted them to, really they needed to subsidise it.

I always thought they would work better as something along the lines of a national rolling news channel but with regular local inserts and bulletins for news/weather/travel. In a way the new Talk local channels are a step in that direction.

[eyeTV]

I guess that That's TV count the text overlay of weather / travel and headlines whilst screening 80's pop videos as original 'local content'.

[Spencer]

It was clear from the start to anyone with any kind of basic understanding of local media how the whole project was doomed to failure.

In an era when local radio stations and newspapers have struggled to stay afloat financially (and many haven’t), the idea that local TV services, which are far more expensive and difficult to run to a professional standard, were going to be viable was nonsense.

[mouseboy33]

Yeah maybe they were too ambitious sadly.
BFMTV France seems to be doing quite well just across the channel. Seems like a more viable model. Shoulda had a national spine to feed programming and periodic local programming blocks across the day would have been better. And not rely on hours and hours of low quality locally made little watched programs. Oh well. The ship has sailed sadly.

[London Lite]

This is why most local tv stations would have benefitted from having the likes of Sky News operating these local channels which would benefit them having local reporters which would benefit the national news channel like BFMTV has operating local tv channels in France.

Sky did experiment with the Tyne & Wear local streaming service, but if they couldn't make that work, then you can see why the vast majority of the local tv stations have a national spine (Local TV with TalkTV and ancient shows on That's TV) rather than a loop of local news and non-news local programming.

Personally I like the model used in France (non BFM owned stations), Belgium and Switzerland where they provide a loop of programming from 6pm which include a news programme and then a locally skewed show, then loop it for 24 hours.

[Stooky Bill]

I always thought they would work better as something along the lines of a national rolling news channel but with regular local inserts and bulletins for news/weather/travel. In a way the new Talk local channels are a step in that direction.

That was the model that was tried by L!ve TV, and I think it's predessesor Wire TV back in the 90s. The problem back then was that virtually no one had cable so viewership was tiny. 

It was also a model proposed by Thames when they bid for Channel 5 the first time round - a network of City TV stations. That could have worked better, unlike L!ve it would have been terrestrial so more viewers, but unlike today much less competition for both viewers and local advertising


Of course Jeremy Hunt's reasoning for introducing Local TV was that Birmingham Alabama has 10 local stations, Birmingham UK has none. Well of course that is technically true but they will almost all have a network providing non local shows

[JAS84]

Yeah, if they have 10 stations, at least 7 of them will have a network affiliation - ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CW, PBS, MyNetworkTV. They're effectively more like ITV. They should only have looked at how many truly independent stations exist. And I bet they're only in the largest markets where there's more channels than networks to affiliate with. The UK has a smaller population, so it was never going to work on the same scale here.

[James2001]

Even the non-affiliated stations will likely be full of syndicated and bought in content, it's not as if they're broadcasting local content all, or even most, of the time.