The idea of the local TV project was a good one, ten years ago.
Lowering the barriers to getting content on the air, centralised operations/transmission centres to lower the technical requirement at a local station, it was neat.
The trouble is, the demand for local TV (outside of BBC regional opt-outs) is pretty low nowadays.
Content that would have gone on the local news is now hosted online.
So these networks have kinda become zombies, putting out the minimum content required to keep the primo spots in the EPG.
I can't help but feel that this is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Commercial TV is in the toilet as everybody moves to online services. We can see what's happened with local newspapers disappearing followed not that long later by the national press. It's great for an unaccountable regulator to pontificate about a requirement for so many hours per day of news, but really does anyone under 60 really need that today? If you want news then you would look at a news source- why would you wait until the next scheduled news bulletin on your channel in an hour or 2 hours time?
I wish someone would threaten that in the US. You wouldn’t believe how much of local newscasts here is national news and regurgitated product press releases. And yet the “local” news runs like ten times per day.
The channel got off to disappointing start with “zero viewers” during primetime broadcasts, meaning its audience was too small to register on the official rating agency, Barb.
TalkTV and GB News have faced investigations by the media regulator Ofcom over complaints about impartiality breaches by presenters.
Scott Taunton, TalkTV’s president of broadcasting, in an email to staff presented the move as a reflection of audience preferences for online viewing.
It said: “Two years ago, we would not have been brave enough to launch a channel without a linear presence, but audiences of all ages have moved fast and smartphones are now the primary device where news is consumed.
The briefing to staff added: “Talk will continue broadcasting as a livestreaming news and opinion channel, distributing through streaming platforms to include YouTube, Amazon Fire, Samsung, LG and others.
The launch schedule for its first day on 25 April 2022 started with The News Desk with the Sun’s former political editor Tom Newton Dunn, followed by Morgan’s Uncensored show.
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The channels are grouped into multiplexes, nominally called PSB1/2/3 and COM4/5/6. Channels themselves are just pointers to various video and audio streams - usually they have names, but can be added without them and remain mostly hidden. This is a service/channel which has been added without a name (the number is the "service id"). Usually this happens and then they get renamed, but in this instance it got removed again.
It’s a replacement which works through the Internet, suspected to use DVB-I. From a user perspective it should look and work just like Freeview (but without the aerial)
UK Digital Terrestrial TV (Freeview)
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