Earlier this month Will Perrin wrote a blog post setting out why Local TV probably won’t work and, more importantly, doesn’t need to. He was responding to the government’s announcement of plans to encourage the development of up to 20 new Local TV stations by 2015.
He echoed a huge number of my thoughts on linear media, transmitters/printing presses and local-ness. Will challenged the government’s concentration on Local TV with a series of statements (for Will’s expansion on these visit his blog post here.):
- Why use television as a medium of transmission at all?
- TV is not local
- For small audience local TV there is no need to regulate news in the traditional way.
- The footprint for any of the 80-odd transmitters is orders of magnitude too large for a real big society impact.
- If you start with the internet, instead of TV low cost public service models are apparent.
- Of the hundreds of good local websites in the UK very few regularly use video to tell stories.
- Public service news done in the traditional British broadcast way is too expensive for local TV
There are a number of other thoughts I could add: (more…)
