London Live: time to pull the plug?

London Live is flat-lining on a 0.3% audience share, its owners are running up losses and it could even help pull The Independent down. So what should Ofcom do now? By Raymond Snoddy.

It was right to give Jeremy Hunt’s local television vision the benefit of the doubt at the outset – even though all rational analysis, precedent and instinct suggested otherwise.

After all, cynics and advertisers have been too quick to write off new media ventures in the past. There are still deep thinkers such as Jeremy Paxman who can’t see the point of Twitter – the most powerful breaking news source yet invented.

Many said, as a form of politeness, a euphemism even, that if local TV could succeed anywhere it would be in London. After all what a huge market to address. What a privilege to be given a licence to address it, complete with free state-of-the-art infrastructure courtesy of subsidies gouged out of the BBC by the Government.

And Ofcom’s decision to give the London licence to the group that owned The Independent, the i and Evening Standard also seemed a move in the right direction.

If London Live were to move into profit relatively quickly, there could be a sustaining virtuous circle where the profits of the new television station might underpin the future of important though struggling newspaper titles.

And pigs might fly.

Enough evidence is now in for it to be safe to say without much shadow of a doubt that there is no great appetite for local broadcast television news in London, whatever people might tell pollsters, and much more to the point that there is no appreciable volume of advertising to support the cost of producing anything remotely watchable.

The result? London Live could help pull The Independent down.

As that considerable media sage and wit John Myers put it recently: “This is what failure looks like, folks.”

Just in case that wasn’t clear enough Myers went on to urge Ofcom to “take out the shotgun and put the bloody dog down…as an act of kindness.”

We don’t know whether Ofcom will be in a kindly mood or not, but they will soon have to take a decision on what to do about London Live.

ESTV, which runs the channel, has had losses of about £1.3 million in its first 13 months, and has already applied to the regulator to cut the hours of peak-time local programmes from three and a half hours to one hour a day.

The aim, naturally, is to show more bought in programmes from Channel 4 such as Coupling and Peep Show; the only sort of programmes that attract noticeable audiences for the local channel.

If London Live had gone to Ofcom proposing it planned to broadcast just one hour of local news in prime-time each night instead of three and a half hours and pad out the rest of the schedule with cheap buy-ins that could appear on any repeat channel anywhere, is there the slightest chance it would have won the licence?

Regulators find themselves in a difficult position when this sort of thing happens. They want to be flexible and reasonable in the hope that maybe with a little more time a financial corner can be turned. There is also the problem of being forced to admit that they screwed up when making their original decision.

The old ITC came close to pulling the plug on the UK’s pioneer commercial breakfast station, TV-am, because of multiple breaches of its licence. TV-am was given the benefit of the doubt and commercial breakfast television is still with us – at least up to a point.

This is different – London Live is flat-lining on a 0.2 per cent to 0.3 per cent audience share, according to BARB.

Now there is merit in the argument that the BARB panel in London is probably too insensitive to measure accurately the audiences of tiny, minority channels.

One minority channel once got excited about an apparent increase of 50 per cent in its admittedly low female audience.

It turned out that the girlfriend of a single male BARB panellist had stayed for the weekend. The 50 per cent spike had disappeared when she went home.

Even if you accept polling research that the true figure might amount to something like 0.4 per cent to 0.5 per cent advertisers are unlikely to be excited about such a performance and, anyway, it hardly amounts to a business.

What should Ofcom do now?

It has the responsibility of implementing Jeremy Hunt’s vision that local television should, above all else, be local and should be produced by a ground-up rather than a top-down process.

It would be a farce if London Live were allowed to cut its prime-time local programming to just one hour within months of its launch.

To make any sense at all of the licence that was advertised then London Live should be required to broadcast a minimum of two hours of prime-time local programming a day. Otherwise what is the point: local programmes with presumably declining budgets shown in the middle of the night?

If London Live won’t, or can’t afford two hours of prime-time local programming, then the licence should be re-advertised.

Given the experience of London Live there might not be too many takers second time around.

As John Myers, who was involved in the failed Manchester local TV station M, is very aware, there is extensive local media already. It’s called local radio and local newspapers – most of whom have been investing in local websites, including an increasing amount of video.

Meanwhile, Ofcom continues on its merry way – as it must – awarding more and more local television licences. This week KMTV was given the licence to broadcast in Maidstone and ‘That’s Basingstoke’ for the Hampshire town. That makes a total of 30 licence awards so far.

Maybe though, conventional wisdom has been wrong all along – that the best chance of success lies in London.

Or perhaps the opposite is true – that London is a hopeless case for local television but that below the national media radar something very modest might manage to establish itself in places such as Maidstone and Basingstoke.

They would be hobby stations manned by volunteers and media students rather than viable commercial operations but they might survive.

Not exactly what Jeremy Hunt had in mind though.

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