Originally Posted by wirewolf:
“Thanks for the link to the Ofcom document.
So Radio City Talk as the AM service will be known will apparently focus heavily on sport in its speech output, which makes me wonder whether the Liverpool Echo article about football commentaries being dropped from 96.7 is because they're moving exclusively to City Talk?”
City 2 already has a networked music and sport show on Saturday afternoon whilst Absolute Radio on DAB already carries a live commentary each Saturday so there could be some networking being done, including Talk taking the City 2 sports show. Interestingly City Liverpool staff appear to be provide the daily sports bulletins on Absolute so it does seem a strange decision to cease the commentary output when Talk is going to be so reliant on sports output.
I'm not sure how the local radio broadcast rights are awarded, the national rights are negotiated with the Premier League which means Talk Sport and the BBC have the main picks with just one match being awarded to Absolute. City had already lost it's coverage of European Football last season so perhaps the writing was on the wall as I suspect a large proportion of the cost would be borne by the sponsors and if one or more cannot be found, then clearly it may be difficult to financially cover the cost. Another complication is now with so much networking in the programming, it becomes increasing difficult to fit match commentary into the schedule especially when matches this season could be broadcast virtually every day of the week with Premier League games now also due to be played on a Friday night.