It’s too early for Hunt to get excited, but is the local TV solution staring everyone in the face?
Raymond Snoddy believes he has found the solution to the local TV conundrum – something, he says, that has been under our noses all along and would work (a light-bulb moment that happened in a pub on the way to a QPR game no less)…
You make discoveries about the media in the strangest places, if you listen carefully enough. It’s not just all about the Financial Times, Screen Digest or Enders Analysis when you are looking for new insights.
Try the Railway Telegraph pub in Thornton Heath, which I visited on the way to the Crystal Palace versus QPR game on Saturday. As you’ve asked, QPR took all three points with a dramatic injury time winner.
But before the game in the pub the talk turned, as you would expect, to imponderable matters such as trying to find a way to make local TV viable in some form.
And then, over the second pre-match pint came the flash of new knowledge. At the very moment that culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, ably assisted by merchant banker Nick Shott of Lazards, has been searching high and low for local TV it was there all along – or at least since March.
Lakes TV, a local station for Cumbria and the Lake district is on TV every day with a mixture of programmes devoted to Lakeland life, entertainment, sport and business. The Lakes TV story unfolded in the Railway Telegraph pub because one of the QPR faithful gathered there was Tony Blin-Stoyle, former Financial Times executive and now commercial director of Information TV, the company responsible for providing the broadcast capacity for Lakes TV.
For new readers, Information TV leases transponders from BSkyB and offers specialist broadcasters packages that can be for as little as one hour a week.
But the footprint of Sky’s satellite channels can reach most of Western Europe… surely that has nothing to do with local TV? Wrong according to Blin-Stoyle and his boss, another former FT executive Fred Perkins.
The economics are such that an hour of television broadcast time can be offered for less than £500 and often as low as £300 and viewers don’t need a Sky subscription.
As cultural secretary Hunt explained last week, his vision would be met if you could have an hour a day of local TV broadcast by local TV stations all over the country. Could it be that, at least a possible solution, is there staring everyone in the face?
Certainly Nick Shott has been in touch with Information TV in the past few days to find out more about what it has to offer.
Anyone who wants to have a look at the tiny service will find it there on Sky channel 203 twice every day, though often at different times. Today, for instance, it’s on at 11.30am and 8pm and at 2.30pm and 7.30pm on Thursdays.
It’s also on Channel M on Freesat in the Greater Manchester area – Information TV bought the channel capacity when the Guardian Media Group closed Channel M. The programmes are also available via broadband.
Lake TV looks good, is produced by television professionals and is fronted by a former Border and Tyne Tees presenter Kim Inglis.
But before Jeremy Hunt starts shouting Eureka there are clear limitations to what a small station like Lakes TV can offer.
At the moment it is producing only 30 minutes of original programmes a week, which is then repeated across the week. There have been good responses both from those living in the region and those who go to the Lake District on holiday or have fond memories of the place.
It is too small to have any precise viewing figures, which at this stage, could be too tiny to measure anyway. This makes the advertising sell problematical even though the company is selling at local newspaper, rather than television, rates.
In fact, the founders of Lakes TV accept that, even such a modest output, could not be funded by advertising alone.
The Lakes TV company has been formed by putting together two local corporate production companies and the Lakes TV programmes are almost like calling cards. They hope more corporate work will follow and that money can also be raised from the sale of DVDs of the events and features covered to professional level. They do think the overall enterprise might be viable and could even expand in time.
Is there anything in this mix-and-match model that could apply to the rest of the country? The obvious extrapolation would be to any area with a distinct identity, which also attracts tourists nationally and even internationally.
Local development authorities might have helped if they hadn’t been canned by the coalition government.
Highland TV, Cornish TV or even Blackpool TV perhaps, on the back of an unexpectedly successful football team?
Smaller, or even larger cities, would almost certainly be much more difficult to finance as extensive experience shows.
It’s definitely too early for Hunt to get excited but if a few such stations did get started and proved themselves viable then you never know what might happen.
You can forget day-dreams about a chain of 80 stations. If anything happens at all it will probably come from a diversity of models creating small local outposts.
At least we now know that the vast infrastructure of the Sky satellite network could be exploited by local TV entrepreneurs if they are determined enough.
The next QPR game is on Saturday week against Norwich. Time to go to the Crown & Sceptre pub and continue the conversation. How about Delia TV covering the Norwich region?
Your Comments
I’ve just read Ray Snoddy’s article on Local TV and Robert Kenny’s comment. I’m glad Ray’s stumbled across the obvious – but both really do need to get out more – especially to places like Liverpool where they would find that the ethos of local TV has been alive and well for a great many years either as local IPTV initiatives like Kensington (yes the real one up North) and Alt Valley Vision, Liverpool.TV or indeed the Open Culture Satellite Channel hosted by, yes, Information TV in 2008.
As regards costs – they are negligible once you break the mindset that media is something the chosen few are allowed to control from, well, London where a 60p cup of coffee is often sold as a £3.75 metrocino. Take Channel 5. Started life as a great social intervention idea to provide an alternative view to London based media. The cheapest, easiest and most desirable place was the North where there would be no technology conflicts. The decision? Well, we should all know the history.
As far back as 1983 I tried to establish a local TV Station for Liverpool – but was always met with the same metropolitan myopia that I face when suggesting that you could produce network programmes like Brookside, Hollyoaks and Grange Hill in a “non-TV franchised city” like Liverpool. It is still lacking its terrestrial TV service of course.
I used to think that it had something to do with the narrow, unenlightened and parochial thinking that usually accompanied people needing to support London based teams like QPR, – or worse, as infamously highlighted by one Broadcasting Minister – Chelsea. Such supporters were, obviously, only ever engaged in domestic, therefore London-centric competition focused on Wembley. Without the stimulation of a European culture how could anything other than London-centricity flourish? However, recent events in football have forced a change in view. It is, after all, simply a case of metropolitan myopia.
Get out and about a bit more guys and discover the real Big Society.
Raymond Snoddy thinks he may have found the local TV solution over a beer at the Railway Telegraph pub, but I fear he was in fact drinking the Kool-Aid.
The proposed solution is to broadcast local TV over satellite, at a transmission cost of (say) £400 per hour. Let’s add in a conservative £100,000 a year to produce the programming and cover all other costs. At an hour of local TV per day, that works out at an additional £275 per hour, for a total of £675 cost per hour.
Assuming 9 ad minutes and 18 ads per hour, we get £37.50 per ad shown as the required revenue. Typical cost per thousand individual impacts (CII) on multi-channels is around £2.50. This means each ad needs to be seen by 15,000 people.
That’s about the same average audience that Nickelodeon and Discovery get, and more than Good Food, the History Channel and ESPN manage. And these blue-chip channels are of interest to national audiences, not just the niche audiences of local TV. In reality, local TV broadcasters are going to get nowhere near an average audience of 15,000. Audiences at the level of the Travel Channel, Fox News or Euronews (about 500-750 individuals) are probably more likely.
The only way to make ends meet therefore is to charge vastly higher cost per thousand CII to those interested in specific local audiences. But what local business is going to go to the expense of making a TV ad that will only be seen by a few hundred individuals on each showing? And why if Tesco pays £2.50 to reach 1000 of its (national) customers, would the local shop be willing to pay many times that to reach 1000 of its (local) customers?
Perhaps I’ve just had a bad pint, but local TV economics still give me a headache.