If local TV can work anywhere it will be in London
Raymond Snoddy asks: Can a local TV station run as a sustaining business once the BBC subsidies end? Will enough viewers watch? Will advertisers be the slightest bit interested?
Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt must be a very happy man. The Olympics were an unexpectedly huge success, while the Leveson inquiry, and all its works, didn’t end a promising political career prematurely. And to top it all there are even signs of life – at least in London – of his favourite hobby-horse, or should that be hobby, local television.
No less than five groups with very plausible names attached, plus promises of serious money, are vying for the London local licence.
Hunt’s cup floweth over, although without the subsidies gouged out of the BBC licence fee the queue might not have been quite so enthusiastic.
Sceptics have to concede that there really ought to be no reason, at least in principle, why a city with a population of more than eight million, constituting the largest urban area in the European Union, should not have a television station of its own.
It is also obvious that to have such a station would be a good thing and add to the diversity of information sources – if a way can be found to make it viable in the longer term.
If local television can work anywhere it would be in London. All things are relative but the chances of a London station making it have to be greater than in any of the other 20 licences on offer around the UK.
We must define our terms here. Any one of the 20 could put out a service of sorts based on limited ambitions and largely local volunteers and students.
The question is can a local station – even one as potentially large as London – run as a sustaining business once the BBC subsidies run out? Will enough viewers watch? Will advertisers be the slightest bit interested?
It would be crazy to try to create such a project from scratch without some easy access to news and information – preferably your own – which is why three of the candidates stand out on current knowledge, and probably in the following order.
Alexander Lebedev has not only saved the Evening Standard and The Independent but is now proposing to save Hunt’s hopes in London.
His strategy for a free Standard has worked spectacularly well, even though large numbers of Londoners have been effectively disenfranchised by his distribution pattern. If you don’t live, or work, in central London you don’t get a copy of the paper – although the website is always there.
Presumably the plan is to use Standard journalists for the main broadcasts with a few additional presenters. Then you add hyper-local IPTV feeds. It has the feel of a potentially viable project through heavy reliance on cross-fertilisation.
Richard Harwood’s Channel 6 has a similar wheeze to find a source for the content. The former Trinity Mirror executive has done a deal with three local and regional newspaper groups with extensive titles across London – Tindle, Archant and Trinity.
The group is chaired by Clive Jones, the former chief executive of Carlton Television. His CV includes the creation of the London News Network for both Carlton and LWT. The management team also includes David Mannion, the former editor-in-chief of ITV News.
It was Channel 6, of course, which argued vociferously that its national plan was the only way to make local television work. Channel 6 would be a national entertainment-driven channel that would provide the backbone to sustain local television stations.
Culture secretary Hunt decided that the national spine concept represented a too “top-down” approach and now Channel 6 is full of the joys of local television.
When the facts change a sensible businessman hops on the passing band-waggon, even if it happens to be travelling in the opposite direction to last year’s vehicle.
It is still a little amusing to see the company commenting on “the barrage of negativity” that the local TV plans attracted, given that Channel 6 was adding to it at the time by insisting a national channel was essential to the viability of the venture. But what the hell – circumstances change.
London8 also stands out, again because the personnel know what they are doing and they include Paul Jackson. The former ITV and BBC executive has recently been launching a new television channel in Mongolia. He may find local TV in London a more demanding challenge.
The chairman of London8 Luke Johnson famously doesn’t like wasting his money. Here the plan is for ITV Productions to run a news service every hour, seven days a week.
Yet despite the flurry of activity, and with the best will in the world, the BUTs still loom very large.
There is the real difficulty of attracting eyeballs for local, or more properly regional news, in the vibrant London media market. There may be fundamental reasons why no-one has ever managed to launch such a thing successfully before.
There is an ever-increasing choice of screen-based entertainment and information aimed at all viewers. It is far from clear that a London station will cut through and attract a significant audience. You can’t effectively watch local television on the tube as you can read an evening paper and taxi drivers will hardly be lured away from live local radio.
You can use the internet to extend the reach of the service with micro hyper-local sites but the danger is they will also attract micro audiences.
Reaching an audience will turn out to be a surprising difficult task, however the greatest challenge of all will be attracting advertising.
Whatever Channel 6 is now trying to argue, commercial television in the UK has been, and probably will remain, a national market.
ITV has struggled for years to make regional news and magazine programmes pay their way. Yet Channel 6 is promising to combine “extensive local news and community engagement” with “world-class entertainment” funded by advertising.
All you can say to the bidders is the best of luck and if you manage to establish a flourishing London station it will be the equivalent of winning gold in the 10,000 metres.
Your Comments
Why does Raymond Snoddy only talk about London? That is the problem with the media – being so London-centric.
There are a large number of applications for local television licences outside the M-25. The interest in local is wide-spread and of great interest to localities that want to have a stronger voice. The UK has rich traditions and cultural diversity, flavours and colours, an abundance of stories, news and current affairs that are relevant in everyday life. People can do something about local.
Local television is not simply a who’s who currently controlling the media. But it’s about community groups, universities, young people, writers and journalists, bloggers, local entrepreneurs, independent producers and freelance broadcasters.
Snoddy’s article is the very reason that Hunt has rightly pushed forward his local television ambitions.
Fred Perkins is spot on in pointing out how ridiculous the current model proposed is: insisting on national standards for niche operations. I just do not get why this is still being flogged in this way, as traditional broadcast licensed operations as opposed to web-based, published services.
Ofcom reserves its highest ‘standards’ bars for licensed services, requiring each to satisfy a demanding set of rules enshrined in its code. News and Current Affairs content in particular (which all these bids major on) must satisfy exacting tests of due accuracy and due impartiality. No ranting on about the nutters at the local council allowed!
When we watch our local opt out news we don’t drop our desire for it to be correct, accurate, unbiased – why would that behaviour change? And yet there exists already a small, quietly growing, almost successful collection of web-based TV services that are providing super local content; sport, events, local info on traffic, travel, health etc – whatever suits their region.
Sky’s pilot digital service in Tyne and Wear and Liverpool’s Bay TV are both impressive already. Why not invest in this route? Especially given the growth of mobile screen usage.
Well said, Ray. A couple of points, though:
Hunt is pursuing a largely Freeview-based approach. That works least of all in London, since no single transmitter gives adequate coverage. So Freeview reach will be small. Even Harwood argued earlier that Satellite was essential for a London ‘local’ station to have decent reach.
Second, ‘local’ TV is by definition niche. What does that mean in London, with a melting pot of just about every minority represented across the whole country? Is a viewer in Essex interested in the same material as a viewer in Richmond? How on earth will advertisers be persuaded to back a collection of micro-niche audiences and sustain the channel?
The answer of course is to reinvent Thames/London Weekend, which is what some (all?) of the bidders are undoubtedly hoping to achieve… and so, by subterfuge, in effect end up with a ‘national’ channel competing with London ITV. How much will that deliver the ‘local’ vision that Hunt embraces? Little at all, if it is to be commercially viable.
Finally, we need to remember that while the public, when ‘surveyed’, widely espouses the concept of local TV, they don’t actually watch it when it is there. Up to 30 minutes a day is about as much as any viewers will tolerate, if that. But they like the idea for ‘others’ to be able to able to see ‘local’ news.
The fundamental flaw in the overall Hunt approach is the attempt to apply what are ‘national’ quality standards and commercial business models (requiring BARB-like ratings) to niche propositions, which can actually only work on micro-business models at much lower cost. In comparing London with other cities in the world, Hunt is confused by the existence of a ‘local’ broadcaster (which actually is mainly broadcasting from a national channel, with minimal ‘local’ material). These ‘local’ channels are in fact little different from the existing BBC and ITV regional variants.
Like you, I wish the bidders luck in their ‘beauty parades’, at which they must demonstrate how they will deliver BBC-like quality on expanded broadcasting hours… on a sustainable basis.