London Live

That's the key thing here, screens with no sound in public places. London Live has potentially got a niche if they're prepared to take the risk of trying.

I live in one part of London. I'm originally from Scotland. I couldn't give a flying toss what happens in 90% of the rest of the capital. I'm not alone in that.

I'm sure this exists to a limited degree in most major cities. There are parts of Glasgow I'm interested in hearing about and other parts I couldn't care about. But the difference is that, because network news is still London-centric, the fact it's Scottish news gives it a distinction.

It would be good to hear about all the community stuff going on in London but that's not going to drive huge amounts of advertising. And I accept the concept of people not knowing what they want - but TV was invented at a point when the only competition was radio, and satellite TV really came to the fore when it had the clear USP of sports programming, before then no-one really cared. And the internet of course was almost certainly made popular by - frankly - porn.

Nothing would make me happier than to come home to a TV service that would tell me exactly what's happening in the capital and what I need to go and see, but most people aren't of a newsy mindset and just want to be entertained. Frankly, running repeats of Channel 4 programmes makes more financial sense. It's for Ofcom, if they're not happy with the repeated requests for a change of format, to cry foul and let someone else have a shot (should they be interested in the first place).

Which is why you centre the service around the essential info Londoners need, the roads, the tubes, the weather, the markets, whats on and maybe the Capital's headline news as an afterthought.

My idea isn't about watching news about some city community 5 miles away, who you don't give a fig about, it's about key information for that you need now all in once place.

Mustard TV in Norwich gets it about right in the mornings.

I would add to that (and apologies for picking up on old arguments, I've not been on for a while) that many capital cities see themselves as the country as a whole, and so don't really see the need for national news. A lot has been said about the UK being London-centric but I'd say the same applies in the likes of Glasgow, where the Evening Times doesn't seem as vital as the Evening Express/Press and Journal in the north of Scotland, and the sales figures appear to back that up. If you live in London you probably don't see the same need for local news as most of the news is about you anyway.

I agree and from a selfish perspective I think it's a shame they don't offer catch up anymore. But there probably isn't much call for the Mustard Show on demand. What's right for Norwich, Nottingham or Bristol though isn't whats right for London.


A more general note, don't think any local TV channel has ever done sport well or understood how to cover local sport, I'm not on about rights as that isn't easy apart from Mustard who really understand what to do and no local TV has done online and social media well and made content that works just for those outlets in a way at a national and even local radio level the BBC is understanding now.

Show us some screen grabs if you ever get a chance as not seen their layout. Made also try to do that sort of thing in the mornings but there isn't much useful information there and some of it seems days out of date.

On the premise that conventional news bulletins are a) a bit old hat and b) well covered by the BBC and ITV anyway, this strikes me as a better road to go down for the two-hour bulletin at least.

To sustain this over the course of an entire day, however, without looping constantly would require a lot of filming and quite a bit of creative thinking. And when you can fling an episode of Celebrity Masterchef on and probably get better ratings, why bother?

I don't think constantly looping is a problem, if it's just on in background in all those public places and people watching at home just watch in 20 minute doses, should the London licence be showing Celebrity Masterchef and are they getting a return on that investment in such a small catchment area compared to other Freeview broadcasters? Celebrity Masterchef strikes me as an easy route to go down but not something that is going to set London Live apart from anyone else and make it something at the heart of the city and not something they should be allowed with that particular local licence. I think the trouble is with London Live they've never really tried the right things to see if they'll work and there isn't an appetite to do so, as they'd rather just play safe.

I don't think looping is a big deal. I know it wasn't exactly a success here but The Weather Channel used to just have an hour's coverage (most of which wasn't live presented) that was run every hour being updated a couple of times a day.

It shouldn't cost *too* much to do something like that, with lots of time being given over to travel news and weather which should be on screen throughout

Being shown on screens in public places, either instead of or in addition to where the BBC News Channel is now, should be the objective.

Yeah BBC News/Sky News are pretty much looping all day.

I think people who think this would be expensive are living in the world of 15 years ago, it's a lot cheaper and easier to do this stuff now. Someone to monitor for at least 12 hours is going to be the biggest cost, the service can more or less run itself apart from that.

The CBS News model of basically an hour of content produced three times a day, with updates and the ability to go live where necessary might work, though I think it would need to be as a half hour bulletin with a back half hour of other content. Wouldn't even have to be all day - one daytime block and an early evening block would be sufficient, but a 30 minute bulletin at 5, 6, 7 and 8pm would make more sense IMO than a two-hour block from 5-7pm.