The big radio industry story of the week is UTV Radio's confirmation that it is "assessing" the potential sale of "some or all" of its local radio stations in England and Wales. Were this to happen, this would have an impact on eight stations that provide coverage of local sport, mostly football - Swansea Sound, Pulse 1, Signal 2, Tower FM, Wish FM, Wire FM, RadioWave and Peak FM.
Here's an article detailing the news -
http://www.theguardian.com/media/201...ations-england - and I also thought I would re-post a
message I wrote on another thread about the potential for sports coverage to continue in the event of UTV Radio selling the stations (apologies for the lengthy nature of it!).
Originally Posted by wns_195:
“UTV has provided good sports coverage on many of its local stations. I hope who ever gets them will continue this.”
Originally Posted by The Difference:
“This is something I am hoping for as well. At present, UTV Radio provides local sports (football, rugby league and rugby union) coverage in eight of the ten GB cities/towns/areas where it has stations - the exceptions being Juice FM in Liverpool and Signal 107 in Wolverhampton, where there are existing commercial radio stations that were and are established as possessing long-running sports coverage (Radio City and Free Radio 80s respectively).
I'll be the first to admit I'm no expert on who UTV Radio may sell their GB local radio stations to (if indeed they decide to), but from reading this thread people feel it is unlikely Global Radio would be able to pick up any/many of these stations due to licensing restrictions on buying new stations in areas where they already own licenses.
This not happening would be good for the future of local sports coverage on those stations - I think the sale of any UTV Radio station to Global may see the end of their sports coverage either at a stroke or in the short-term future. Prior to the GCap merger, in the summer of 2004 all of the local sports coverage across what was then the Capital Gold network (in places like London, Southampton, South Wales) was cancelled, with coverage only continuing in updates form and then a return to commentary in the West Midlands - on stations that in 2009 would of course become independent from Global through Orion Media.
Nothing has happened in the decade since then to suggest they would maintain local sport if they were to inherit it, although it is to Global's credit that upon purchasing SGR FM and Horizon Radio and rebranding them as Heart in January 2009 they maintained commentaries on Ipswich Town and MK Dons on the respective stations until the end of that football season, rather than ending the coverage immediately.
Were Bauer Media to purchase any of the UTV Radio stations with sports coverage, I think there are grounds to be optimistic from my perspective. While it's by no means a sure thing that they'd want to continue sports coverage given how nowadays relatively few of their local stations hold sports rights, including ones such as Metro and Radio Aire who had long-running coverage of major football clubs, they have maintained football commentaries on Radio City in Liverpool and recent developments have been positive in this respect.
Nationally they have overseen the beginning of a three-year Premier League radio rights commentary deal on Absolute Radio (albeit the deal was renewed by the previous owner) and upon the departure of lead commentator Jim Proudfoot in the summer, they signed Jon Champion as his replacement - who is high profile in his field of work due to his BBC and ITV experience, so won't have been a cheap option - which indicates they are happy to continue to support Absolute's coverage and that it will have a future when the rights expire in 2016. In Scotland, significantly at the start of this football season they purchased local commentary rights to Scottish Premiership and Championship games for all of their local AM stations, with individual opt-out commentaries as part of their Game On networked coverage (a similar set-up to how what is now Free Radio 80s used to arrange their coverage when it aired on Orion's FM stations under their heritage names).
These moves suggest that Bauer are comfortable with sports coverage on their stations so long as they are profitable and/or can fill a gap in the market. How they'd view existing coverage on individual UTV Radio stations I've no idea, but certainly you'd think they'd be more open to continuing them than Global would.
As for the smaller groups, of course they are much harder to judge given the lack of comparable sports offerings and how management are presumably more likely to judge a station on its individual merits than make a group-wide decision. However, stations like Mansfield 103.2, Jack FM in Oxford and the Town and Country Broadcasting network in Wales have been able to make local sports commentaries/programmes work, so it can be done.”
Any listeners to the sports coverage on the various UTV local radio stations have any thoughts on the potential ramifications of a sale on their local coverage?
