Ofcom has told London Live that it must keep to its programming commitments. The regulator has refused a request to reduce the amount of peaktime local programming per day from three hours to one hour. It also wanted to reduce the total amount of local content per day from ten hours to eight hours. The commitment to repeated local programming would also be dropped.
Ofcom’s Broadcast Licensing Committee said the character of the service would be substantially altered and that a decrease in the number of programmes made in the locality was unacceptable.
Two year’s after the award of the first licences, Ofcom has warned that not all the new channels, which have access to Freeview/DTT capacity, will succeed. “This is an inherent feature of the nature of awarding a large number of licences for a new service across very different parts of the UK”.
A total of six Local TV services are currently on-air.
- Grimsby (broadcasting from November 2013)
- Mustard TV, Norwich (broadcasting from March 2014)
- London Live, London (broadcasting from March 2014)
- Notts TV, Nottingham (broadcasting from May 2014)
- STV Glasgow, Glasgow (broadcasting from June 2014)
- Latest TV, Brighton & Hove (broadcasting from August 2014)
