It would help to fill in the gaps for anyone not using the transmitter assigned to their "local" service.

And now the license for the two smallest cites and surrounding hinterland has been awarded to http://www.a516digital.com/2013/02/l...unced.html?m=1 London Live....

Just ever so slightly pedantic :sleep:

Greater London as a whole is a world recognised Global City. The only people who care about the Historic Royal City status of London & Westminster are historians, councillors and parking wardens

I think those that London 8 will be disapointed but I feel London Live is more viable & looks as if they will cover a lot of the capital events & not to mention news.

Speaking of viability. Ofcom awards Manchester licence to YourTV Manchester.

I'm quite surprised they've gone for the most ambitious (and quite possibly unsustainable) bid. I assume they've completely forgotten about Channel M.

Channel M itself was successful in analogue but had the misfortune of being owned by a company (GMG) that was in serious financial trouble in 2009/2010. Their only management action at the time was "sell everything off" to raise funds. Sadly the MEN was sold but not Channel M which depended on the MEN newsroom for its local news content. That was the dagger in the heart and Channel M was fatally wounded and unviable.

The other factor was the end of analogue and the need to reinvest into digital, which GMG partially achieved although with a poor and low antenna. Canis are trying to get all their local TV antennas placed as high as possible on the masts, according to their technical statement.

If Channel M had had a solvent owner, in better economic conditions, I am sure it would have been as successful now as it used to be. With all the financial incentives available today, I think Your TV Manchester will be profitable and as popular as Channel M ever was. Manchester is England's second city and if this new incarnation of local TV fails there, it will fail everywhere else except London.

According to a tiny article stuck in the corner of our free local paper, ours have gone to something called Comux.

I still don't see the point, it is going to cost money and do nothing. in a big city maybe, but In a place like Hereford, i really can't see it being much cop.
I suppose they could tell people when another shop closes

Comux won the infrastructure licence for all 19 local TV services - http://media.ofcom.org.uk/2013/01/28...tiplexlicence/

You can find your local licence winner in this list http://licensing.ofcom.org.uk/tv-bro.../local/awards/ if it has been awarded yet.

Thanks, nope, we are not there, thank goodness, hopefully some of them will fail and it will never happen. Just a waste of money that will be filled up with tripe and council propaganda like we have in a council magazine that cost us a fortune

I think it's highly unlikely it will be profitable. The model put forward by pretty much all of the other licensees in all the areas outside London is more viable than this one. Their head count and running costs are astronomical by comparison and the amount of new programming it says it's going to generate is unsustainable.

Say what you like about GMG but it still has cash reserves in the hundreds of millions. They simply lost interest in Channel M and refused to spend any more money on it. Your TV in comparison is highly unlikely to have anywhere near as much money at their disposal, and given they intended to win many more licenses than they have, it's quite possible they no longer have a workable business plan.

You don't think the eventual local tv broadcaster for your area will do the exact opposite and hold your local council to account? Unless the council themselves win the licence (which would never be allowed to happen) why would the local tv channel want to act as a cheerleader for the local council?

Just to be completely accurate, GMG has never been in financial trouble, serious or otherwise. Yes, the business model of the Grauniad and Observer is fundamentally flawed and GMG 'will' fail eventually (unless they reel GNM's spending in, which they'll never do), but not right now.

GMG simply sold the MEN (or more accurately GMGRM) because it was no longer making the massive profits it used to, in fact it was in danger of beginning to lose money. Given the trifling sum they sold it for, they didn't do it for the money. GMG have long said that all their subsidiaries are there solely to support the Guardian and Observer, and if they feel they would be better off by selling them, they will sell them. They've done exactly the same thing with GMG Radio. It was a business with a large turnover and small profit. It didn't benefit the group to keep them on the books, so they sold it when they got a good offer.

Hereford is in "Phase 2", so you have a while to wait yet to see if anybody even applies for it.

As The Turk says, it's incredibly likely a local TV channel will be holding the council to account. This is exactly what your local newspaper will be doing, but it appears you ignore that and just read the council magazine!

I would say 'Metro 8' was more ambitious but to be honest I saw nothing wrong with MCR TV. They seem to have programmes that people would watch like sport, comedy, stand up & outdoor pursuits but instead Manchester will be getting Business, Mum's tv & a slot on books.

Also this is not the first time that either Made or Yor tv have been pitted up against each other with Made winning in Newcastle.

I hope Leeds is not saddle with either Made or Your tv.

I think you'll find Brummies might disagree... though I suppose Greater Manchester vs West Midlands isn't that far behind

http://www.ukcities.co.uk/populations/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...United_Kingdom

Speaking to a friend of mine, apparently Your TV is going to generate more new content per annum for Manchester than ITV does for the whole of the UK. Something like 14 hours of original programming per day. That is sheer lunacy, but it's now written into their licence. So they're either going to have to do it or ask for a licence variation.

Well ours will be run by the "local" newspaper...

"The winning group included Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham Post Media Group, Inclusive Digital and Confetti Media Group."



So a local tv service, which is meant to have programming (especially news and current affairs) for local people made in the local area has more hours per day of programming made in it's home city will have more hours than Granada does - when the latter is one of 15 franchises competing for air time on the network, which has much less current affairs (and can therefore repeat more stuff). It's not that daft.

That being said - seeing how a channel will survive producing more hours a day of local programming than ALL the local TV stations in Birmingham, Alabama* will be interesting to say the least.

* Jeremy Hunt's favourite comparisons - yes Birmingham Alabama has 7 (well 6 if you discount the two that are part of the same network and run the same shows) local channels vs 0 in Birmingham, Warwickshire but still has less than half a days local programming between them (discounting teleshopping).

Their application states 14hrs per weekday of original programming with 8½ hrs live. Live TV is the cheapest of course but that still leaves 5½ hrs of original recorded output.

Further reading finds "risk factors" and it appears that advertising revenue is fairly crucial. 63 employees also seems rather a lot even if some directors are being paid by the parent companies.

I agree that this will be an interesting channel to monitor its performance and to succeed they will have to take substantial viewers from other mainstream channels. The original Channel M did manage to do this in peak time though.

I think licence variations will be common throughout local TV whatever happens.

Which was the one thing DCMS said they couldn't help with, and the the one thing that really killed Channel M.

I'm sure it's all completely legal and above board, but that just 'sounds' wrong to me. It doesn't strike me as a true representation of their running costs. But then again, I suppose it's not all the different from filling it full of volunteers.

But varying a part of the licence which was the reason you were ultimately awarded it in the first place sounds a little dodgy. Like winning a licence based on playing loads of Jazz music, and then saying you don't want to play any Jazz.

Depends how much the council pays to the people who run the local TV station.
our local radio stations don't hold our council to account, so I can't see the local Tv being any different.

Hopefully not. It is a stupid idea for some thing the size of Herefordshire unless it is linked in with surrounding places like our so called local radio stations do.


So I ignore our local paper do I? I wonder why I buy it each week if I ignore it.

Our local paper is pretty good to be honest in printing what goes on, so yes i do take more notice of our local paper than the propaganda Magazine that cost the tax payers far too much money that the council prints.

No one wants the magazine and yet the council still wasting money on it and now going to go for fortnightly rubbish collection. their priorities are wrong.

Not going to make much difference to me as such as I only have half a bag a week, so i will save bags in the long run as I can fill a bag right up.

The councils are under a legal obligation to publish that information, most have deemed that the local press have such low readership it's not meeting there obligations to use them, not enough of the population have the internet so that's not practical either so producing there own is the way to go. At least ours is only every six months or so - I get the impression some are more frequent and therefore wasteful than that!

In that case, imagine that your local TV station is like the paper, but on TV. Because it's going to be more like that, than like your council magazine on the TV.


You don't have to put your bin out every week. You could enforce your own fortnightly collection, which is what I do quite often when there's naff all in the bin. But this is veering off-topic.

We got a free newspaper every week, so they could use that, it would cost a lot less than the magazine and i expect the same amount of people will read it, maybe more.

looking at some the local forums and also from the letters page in the newspaper a lot of people think the magazine is a waste of money and many just chucks it away as soon as they get it never reading it.
I never had one this time, not that I am bothered I can read it on the council useless website.

Have a look at the last one here, a PDF file and you will see how much is just pure propaganda, most is in the news papers anyway.

but then it is like the housing association that owns the house i live in, we get a propaganda magazine from them and the same at work, one from them as well. all money that could be put to better use.



I think ours is every quarter, not sure really

We will see. lets see how many members of our council got some part in it, that is if it ever happens. I can't see any one wanting to bother here to be honest.

They got to get money to set it up, they then got to make money to keep it running, a lot more expensive than keeping a radio station going and since many people can get local news and what is going on from the radio or the net and the weekly paper, I can't see local Tv doing any good here.


Oh but i do, after all I pay for the service, so I am going to get what I can out of it, considering that the amount of money I pay to the council and get very little out of it.