LOCAL TV EXPERIMENT
Following an announcement in August of 65 potential sites for Local TV, the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has identified twenty towns and cities which, by 2014, could have stations in his Local TV experiment.
Those said to have “…significant levels of interest from potential operators…” will be: Belfast; Birmingham, Brighton&Hove, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Grimsby, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich, Nottingham, Oxford, Plymouth, Preston, Southampton and Swansea.
A further 24 areas identified for the next stage are: Aberdeen; Ayr, Bangor, Barnstaple, Basingstoke, Bedford, Cambridge, Carlisle, Derry/Londonderry, Dundee, Guildford, Hereford, Inverness, Kidderminster, Limavady, Luton, Maidstone, Malvern, Mold, Salisbury, Sheffield, Stoke-on-Trent, Stratford-upon-Avon and York.
The Minister said: “Local TV will be a fundamental change in broadcasting in this country, meeting a real demand for local news and content. We are now putting in place the measures needed to establish a series of commercially viable local TV stations.”
Mr Hunt went on to say: "I am confident these new stations will provide local communities with programming which is relevant to their daily lives, will support local democracy, boost the Big Society and enhance local communities.”
Local TV is expected to air on Channel 6 on Freeview and is being paid for with capital funding of £25m, and then a further £5m a year towards running costs for the first three years, taken from the BBC licence fee. The Government is now taking a number of steps to “create a new statutory framework for licensing that will allow for transmission infrastructure to be built and the new local TV services to start operating”.
