The death of local TV has been greatly exaggerated
David Hayward
is a video consultant. Twitter: @david_hbm
Sheffield Live! website
Since 2012, the media regulator Ofcom has granted more than 30 licences to companies wanting to provide local news and programmes. In August the company that was awarded the licence for Birmingham went into administration. Then an attempt by London Live failed to drastically cut the number of hours of local programming and Ofcom admitted for the first time that some stations would never make it to air.
None of these seem to bode well for the dream of former culture secretary Jeremy Hunt. He wanted to create a network of Ofcom-regulated local TV stations covering the UK. He famously questioned why Birmingham, with a population of 1.3m people, did not have a local TV station, while Birmingham, Alabama, with a population of less than 250,000, could sustain eight.
The Birmingham (UK) bid became synonymous with the project and its failure has now led many to question the future of the whole concept. The fact that London Live notoriously recorded no measurable audience several times in its first month appears to only support this.
These were two of the stations thought most likely to succeed. London Live has the backing of Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the station and, very importantly, the Evening Standard. It has received incredible support from the newspaper, with huge amounts of free publicity and promotion.
I was involved in some of the early discussions with the team in Birmingham. With the right multimedia strategy, partners and backers in place, it seemed the business plan would work. Sadly this proved not to be the case.
But should the travails of two stations be the benchmark for local TV and the future of local video news. Those involved clearly disagree.
Jamie Conway, chief executive of Made Television, one of the biggest players in the sector, told me that outside London and Birmingham there are real success stories. In the next six weeks, Made is launching four stations: in Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds and Tyne and Wear. It has teams in place, programmes ready to run, and, most importantly, says Conway, local businesses wanting to invest and advertise.
Sheffield Live recently became the seventh station to launch. It follows, as well as London, stations in Grimsby, Norwich, Nottingham, Glasgow and Brighton. They are all quietly building audiences and serving their local communities.
At the end of August, Notts TV released its first figures: a weekly audience of 189,000. STV Glasgow reported more than 572,000 viewers in the first month, and the statistics for Mustard TV in Norwich show nearly 100,000 people have watched.
It’s unclear what these figures definitively mean: the stations are in still very much in their infancy but arguably they demonstrate that there is a significant audience for local TV. Jamie Conway also points out that the figures most quoted for London Live, the ones where it has no audience, are from April. The station viewing figures have been growing for the past 11 consecutive weeks.
It is not only local TV stations that are reporting a growth in local video news and programmes. Local newspapers and the regional press are beginning to invest seriously in video and online TV. The big media groups, Trinity Mirror, Local World and Johnston Press, have all earmarked local video as a priority for their future business.
At this point I should declare an interest. I have recently joined Martin Head at Local Local Local TV. We are in the process of setting up a network of online local TV services across the Midlands. Stratford TV and Coventry TV are the first, with more to come in the 2014 and 2015.
We are not the only ones. Leicestershire TV has just launched, and there are dozens of examples of hyperlocal video operations around England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
I have been a passionate advocate of local TV and video since I helped run the BBC’s local TV pilot back in 2006. There is clearly a demand for local news and video, local programmes, and a sense of local identity.
The landscape is mixed: some of them will work and some won’t. But it would be a mistake to announce the death knell of local TV on the basis of one company going into administration and a few poor viewing figures.
