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Regional publishers awarded local TV licences

Regional publishers Archant and Trinity Mirror were among the winners as the latest set of licence to run local TV channels were handed out.

Ofcom has given Norfolk-based Archant a licence to run Mustard TV in Norwich, while a partnership between Made TV and Trinity Mirror’s the South Wales Echo has been awarded the licence for Cardiff.

A further licence awarded today sees Made TV partnering with press agency the South West News Service to run a channel for Bristol, which will have a director at the agency, Martin Winter, as its station manager.

They have been awarded part of the government’s plans to roll out local TV, with former deputy editor at Brighton’s The Argus, Frank Le Duc, leading news coverage for a channel in Brighton which won its bid earlier this month.

Norwich’s Mustard TV is set to start broadcasting in autumn next year on Channel 8 after its launch as an online channel next January.

Archant said the channel would aim to provide five times as much airtime to Norwich news each weekday than the existing coverage by BBC East and ITV Anglia and it will also broadcast its flagship magazine programme The Mustard Show.

Mustard Chairman, Johnny Hustler, who is Archant Anglia MD, said: “We are delighted to have been given this opportunity to extend the valuable service we have been providing to the people of Norwich and Norfolk for the past 160 years through our printed and digital publications such as the EDP and Evening News.

“We look forward to producing a station which will highlight a wide range of local issues, stimulate well-informed debate and motivate local people to engage.”

The channel will be on air from 6am to midnight, seven days a week, providing access to the latest news, weather and traffic information, along with entertainment shows and documentaries.

Mustard MD, Fiona Ryder said: “Our vision is for Mustard to be seen as a community asset: a local broadcast service that reflects life and champions community concerns and gives viewers a new voice. We will partner with academic institutions, local businesses and production companies to ensure that Mustard is an authentic local service made by and for the people of Norwich.

“As part of Archant, one of the UK’s largest independently owned regional media groups, with its group head office in Norwich, Mustard is uniquely positioned to sustain a local commercial television service for the city and the surrounding area.

“It will draw on its long-established media resources, especially in the delivery of high-quality journalism across a range of media channels, commercial sales, sponsorship and back office support.”

The Cardiff channel, which will be called Made in Cardiff, aims to start broadcasting next March.

Its application said it would have its own team and be editorially independent, despite its partnership with the South Wales Echo.

The channel aims to broadcast 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with a mix of local programming and other content.

10 comments

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  • September 19, 2012 at 12:29 pm
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    I hope these new local TV stations are better than the woeful internet video offerings of so many local newspapers. I suppose they can’t be worse.

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  • September 19, 2012 at 3:03 pm
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    Remember Channel M, the TV station for Manchester? Guardian media sank millions into it and it still failed. It was of good quality with people with TV and broadcast experience involved but it crashed, despite everyone’s best efforts. TV is as old media as print.

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  • September 19, 2012 at 4:27 pm
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    It’s nice to see the regional press trying something new, but I find it hard to believe there’s a future in local television – it seems a rather old-fashioned and backward-thinking way of trying to make a dent in the modern media landscape.

    Hancock sums it up perfectly when (s)he says “TV is old media, as is print”. Television involves making long-form content which runs to an inflexible, predetermined schedule – and in an Internet-dominated world where consumer choice is prized and attention spans are measured in seconds, I can’t see it being very popular.

    Put it this way: why would someone tune in to watch… I don’t know, let’s say… a cookery “programme” hosted by the owner of a local restaurant, or a keep-fit “programme” hosted by the local gym, when they can watch similar content (but with infinitely higher production values) on national TV?

    If local papers want to get in tune with the current climate, it seems to me that they’d be far better off improving their web offerings to make them true multimedia experiences – good news copy, lots of slideshows (with professional pics taken by real photographers, not just crappy user-submitted ones) and short videos only where the story would actually benefit from having one.

    You could produce something like the above at a fraction of the cost of making “local TV”, and it’d be far less cumbersome to boot. This sudden burst of enthusiasm for local TV strikes me as something of a fool’s gold rush.

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  • September 20, 2012 at 9:29 am
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    Who remembers Channel One, which DMGT provided on the Cable London platform a few years back?
    It was worthy but dull, and the fact it was run on a shoestring was all too clear to see.
    Economies of scale dictate that ‘local’ TV will always suffer the same fate.

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  • September 20, 2012 at 9:30 am
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    Just as broadcast television is starting to evolve into on-demand Web TV, publishers, already failing miserably with their attempts to make their internet offerings pay, but anxious not to miss A New Thing, are running for another bus to nowhere.

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  • September 20, 2012 at 10:44 am
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    Oh that reminds me…where are Archant’s latest print ABCs after they cooked-up at least half of the last lot?
    Wonder how many viewers they will be claiming for Mustard TV.

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  • September 20, 2012 at 12:18 pm
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    as if regional television isn’t dull enough to send you into a coma now we are going local. Cant wait for the cats up trees , looking back 100 years and some boring politician droning on and on and on…

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  • September 20, 2012 at 12:30 pm
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    No one watches the local TV news as it is. Where we are we have Pointless West (smug BBC types), and ITV Westcountry which is so ludicrous it hardly seems worth doing … we get news from Cheltenham to Land’s End. It might as well be news from Outer Mongolia for all the relevance it is. Now were are meant to swallow more local TV, probably on a shoestring. What is the point?

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  • September 20, 2012 at 12:58 pm
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    It will be interesting to see how this develops, but the thing that is most likely to let it down is lack of investment.

    Nothing looks worse than really cheap telly, and the viewing public have become used to quite high production values in their regional broadcasts.

    If the new franchises serve up shaky hand-held shots of a gulpy print journo trying to do a piece to camera and failing, they’re going to struggle.

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  • September 20, 2012 at 2:06 pm
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    Squareyes…..how can you possibly know their content plan? It was meant to be a secret and now you’ve told the world…

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