A little local difficulty 

28 September 2010 tbs.pm/1215

After the Tories’ manifesto pledge that Labour’s ITV regional news provider proposal will be swiftly replaced with something that’s city-centric (despite the alarmingly high failure rate for local television), it was inevitable that some form of compromise would emerge for the concept of local UK television provision.

Basically speaking, it’s the BBC’s previous promise to provide local web-based news content to third parties reheated and expanded to include other public service broadcasters (particularly ITV/STV/UTV, Channel 4 and Five), which could theoretically work well in principle dependent on how it’s implemented.

(There’s no point in providing free local content if it just ends up behind some large corporate paywall.)

Plus at this point it’s also impossible to discuss the future of television without bringing in to the equation YouView (the consortium formerly known as Project Canvas), along with the observation that at least one of the objections to YouView originates from an existing local television provider (Six TV who provides services for Oxford and Southampton).

Therefore if YouView is to get a swift clearance to launch before Apple/Google/Microsoft, etc., get their tentacles into the UK IP TV market, then the YouView consortium will have to wholeheartedly embrace local television perhaps to the point of providing services free of charge to existing local TV providers if it’s to remain on good terms with Jeremy Hunt.

Certainly next year will see at least a few televisions with Google TV integrated into them, therefore YouView will have to publicly launch sometime before the summer to stand any chance of success. Therefore it’s not hard to

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