[cma-l] Shott Review of economics of local television – Northern Visions reply to why use the web?

[Northern Visions]

Reply to William Perrin.

There is much to think about and agree in your email. However the basic premise of only distributing Local TV only through the Internet is something we must challenge.

Someday, there may be a robust infrastructure where we all receive current television channels in HD quality over the Internet but until that day the majority of individuals and their families will still prefer the relatively simple method of watching programmes on their home televisions in comfort.

While NvTv, Belfast’s community television service makes extensive use of the net for live streaming and ‘watch again’ programming, even the constraints of traditional analogue broadcasting still provide the catalyst and motivation for those who participate in the channel.

There are very few examples of local television, which operate successfully through the net.

In many countries citizens have their local and community television and it has been frustrating that so far the U.K. has not put adequate resources into rolling out local television. When provision was made for local radio within the blink of an eye over 170 stations mushroomed across the U.K.

In the Republic of Ireland recent legislation has resulted in community television stations in Cork and Dublin. By contrast, in the U.K. endless deliberations with Ofcom and Department of Culture, Media and Sport on local television continue.

You are right about developing other funding models for local television stations. While national and regional TV stations rely on finance from London-based ad consortiums, there are options for a creative approach to advertising at local level for local television …one of the reasons why local newspapers object to local television. Smaller business would welcome the opportunity to advertise (and indeed star!) on television at prices they could afford. You are also right to highlight that Ofcom’s regulation for local TV needs to take a different approach than that applied nationally. For example, providing a framework where publicly minded organisations can buy airtime from local television stations to broadcast their own material and in the process contribute to the station’s income through hiring their facilities to make such content.

When we first began programme making (in the 70s), the cost of producing programming was prohibitive and meeting the exacting technical broadcast standards intimidating. Transmission was a ‘black art’. Having one’s own transmitter has swept aside many of the barriers of the past. While transmitters can be relatively expensive, they too, like video production and editing equipment, are becoming accessible, affordable, smaller and reliable. We no longer need a treasure chest to set up a local TV station.

Nicholas Shott on behalf of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is looking at the potential for commercially viable local TV stations across the UK. However there is a distinction between ‘local’ and ‘community’ television stations. Community stations tend to be not-for-profit, and their work extends well beyond providing a local news service. They have integrated practice: training, exhibition education in encouraging participation from the local community. So when you state that ‘predominately elderly, poor C2Des’ are of little interest to advertisers in a local economic television framework community television, that is simply wrong. Community television in Belfast, Dublin and Cork has a track record of embracing and involving all constituencies across their cities as well as marginalised and harder to reach groupings. Their practice and achievements are more in line with David Cameron’s Big Society thinking that any commercial prospect has been in the past and may well be in the future. The tragedy is that despite copious reports, meetings, years of practice and experience, those making the deliberations do not examine why the only local television stations in the UK and Ireland which have not failed, have a similar model and mode of engagement. Anyone working in community media will be on the same page with this sentiment, it has echoes across the sector.

We can only trust that Nicholas Shott’s final deliberations make that distinction and do not hinder the progress of local television with this community ethos. He has been invited to the two local TV stations in the UK, which exist; so far he has not taken up that offer.

Northern Visions has tested and explored ways of generating commercially derived income but this direction has been undermined by a problematic transmission - a situation determined by Ofcom and frequency/power allocation.  This is something we hope the changeover to digital will resolve. Our current situation is that available digital bandwidth is consumed by the national broadcasters, a disappointing scenario given the number of programme and channel repeats. Finding just one channel for local television appears to be a low priority and elusive and we live with the realisation that any spare bandwidth will be auctioned off. We do not live in a meritocracy, nor is much thought put into preserving and developing what local people have been asking for as evidenced in numerous reviews especially the Second Review of Public Service Broadcasting. It has often seemed like it is enough to let local people, local authorities, local organisations comment as if that is the end of their ‘rights’ rather than to listen to what they are saying and see if this may be acted upon.

The collective aspiration for England, Wales and Northern Ireland was to have a UK channel for local television allowing for stations to opt in and out as they wished broadcasting their own local material. The aspiration for Scotland is not vastly different but is tempered by some different engineering scenarios. Surely not that much to ask for? A smooth path to establishing numerous community television stations could be resolved by acknowledging community local television as a public service, which it clearly is based on responses to the Second Review of Public Service Broadcasting and the existing examples of local TV in the UK which have stood the test of time.  Legally bound ‘must carry’ policy then takes effect: freeview, satellite and cable immediately become the vehicles for what would be both an exciting and revolutionary period in the history of community media.

Dave Hyndman

Northern Visions
23 Donegall Street
Belfast BT1 2FF
Phone 02890 245495
Fax 02890 326608
www.northernvisions.org
info at northernvisions.org
 
NvTv 
Belfast Community Television
Free-to-Air on Channel 62/Freq:799.276MHz
Live on line: www.nvtv.co.uk





On 10 Aug 2010, at 13:37, CMA-L wrote:

> Source: http://talkaboutlocal.org.uk/shott-review/
> 
> August 9th, 2010  |  Published by william perrin in Blog
> 
> The Secretary of State has asked Nicholas Shott a media financier to
> review the economics of local TV for him. I am seeing Mr Shott today
> at his request (Monday 9 August 2010).  I presume I have been asked as
> an exponent of the local web as a source of news, information and
> entertainment (although I have a wider background in broadcast
> regulation declared at the end of this post).  This rather hurried
> post (now tidied up a bit) has been submitted to the Shott team as
> written evidence.
> 
> For me the overarching question is why do local video programming on
> TV rather than the internet? The internet does almost everything that
> small audience local TV can do but far cheaper and more flexibly.
> 
> I am grateful to Nick Booth a former regional BBC TV producer and now
> leading light of the grass roots internet in Birmingham for talking
> this through – his constant repetition of ‘why not the internet?’ was
> most helpful.
> 
> The amount of information about the secretary of states thinking is
> limited to a couple of speeches. So I have made some working
> assumptions about his views and the state of the market – these are
> all open to challenge of course:
> 
>    * The audiences for a new local TV channel with limited marketing
> resources will be small.
>    * Democratic accountability in a big society with power devolved
> to neighbourhoods is a public good the Secretary of State seeks to
> acquire, but no others
>    * There is a willingness to look at all fundamentals of regulation
> – eg news, content, technical standards
>      Regulatory concessions to increase revenue are limited in scope
> and impact (eg DTTV EPG positioning)
>    * The Parry vision of ‘multimedia’ stations is secondary to the
> desire to do ‘television’ – i.e. electromagnetic transmission of
> moving pictures for simultaneous reception in multiple dwelling places
>    * Media ownership laws will be changed to allow local newspapers
> or radio companies to own local TV stations
>    * Approximately 80 transmitters covering about 90% of the
> population are in play for local TV, not the thousands of small
> repeaters.
> 
> In summary form against this background here is a list of issues,
> questions and observations:
> 
> Why use television as a medium of transmission at all? What does using
> television as a medium of transmission add that the internet can’t do
> at a fraction of the cost? The normal pro-TV argument of mass
> simultaneous audiences reaching millions of eyeballs doesn’t wash for
> these tiny local stations. Audiences will be small, easily manageable
> in YouYube or Vimeo without an expensive playout facility. Although up
> to one third of the population isn’t online it is hard to make a case
> that these predominately elderly, poor C2DEs sadly of little interest
> to advertisers will form the backbone of a successful commercial
> television enterprise. Nor that new local TV stations will suddenly
> make content to appeal to them.
> 
> TV is not local – an MP for instance would never consider a citizen’s
> business to be local if it was in another MPs constituency – yet even
> the smallest transmitter area will cover many constituencies. TV is
> national, regional or slightly sub regional.
> 
> For small audience local TV there is no need to regulate news in the
> traditional way. The local internet and local papers can drive
> plurality. The TV audiences will be so small the old ‘regulate the
> powerful news oligopolies argument’ fall away. Most hyperlocal
> websites in the UK are studiously balanced and demonstrate marvellous
> public service without regulation and importantly without a profit
> motive – they are mainly volunteer run. Sadly the commentariat rarely
> looks beyond the ranting political blogs and newspaper discussion
> forums.
> 
> The footprint for any of the 80-odd transmitters is orders of
> magnitude too large for a real big society impact. I have a long track
> record of grass roots campaigning and activism, using the web to drive
> more effective traditional campaigns and spread news and information.
> London’s local TV has been of no use to me in this – the area covered
> is too big, it’s too time consuming for a volunteer to engage with the
> palaver of TV and their understanding of neighbourhood issues is weak.
> The big society is mainly about grass roots activism in a
> neighbourhood e.g. my square mile – some communities such as a valley
> or hilly area might theoretically benefit from access to their local
> repeater for broadcast. But it would be far cheaper for them to do
> video on the internet (say a $50 Vimeo Plus account or YouTube for
> free and a £130 Kodak HD flip style camera, £20 mic) or, more
> practically use a simple free website in wordpress.com.
> 
> Birmingham UK v Birmingham Alabama is often used as an example.
> Birmingham UK has a superb set of local, volunteer run grass roots
> internet media covering news, entertainment, events and culture.
> Excellent stimulus of this scene by Screen West Midlands has played an
> important role. This web scene surpasses anything local TV has ever
> produced in the UK. Against the background of the excellent local new
> media scene the Birmingham proposals for CityTV look tired and dated.
> If you start with the internet, instead of TV low cost public service
> models are apparent.  The internet is a better alternative to local tv
> for local public service content. Working with Aquila TV, Paul Hadley
> Stoke news site PitsnPots and others, talk about local conceived a
> grass roots, low cost public service model, featuring video that could
> work in a city like Birmingham, particularly if attached to an
> existing media company such as a newspaper.  Lacking resources we have
> sketched it out as follows:
> 
>    * Create a small not for profit – either a CIC or a trading arm of
> a civic charity. Appoint a Controller – someone with a broad social
> media background – to run a website, monitor news feeds and commission
> simple news coverage 9-5 and run a team of volunteers. The Controller
> would be the only full time employee.
>    * Create a simple robust framework website using say wordpress or
> drupal with some cheap hosting – it will only need to cope with
> several thousand uniques per day, the costs should be trivial.
>    * Create a simple public service charter like the Dogme
> Manifesto/vow of chastity – a set of principles not detailed rules
> that content on the site has to abide by.
>    * Public service video mainly has to be paid for – it is too time
> consuming and fiddly for people to create themselves for nothing.
> Start to ‘commission’ video from local practitioners on a daily basis,
> using an approach based on content farming:
> 
>    ‘Cllr Miggins has said/done something controversial £100 for the
> first video interview up in YouTube of either Cllr Miggins or someone
> affected putting their point of view.’
> 
>    * The video is then embedded in the site – the number of videos
> commissioned per day would obviously be determined by the budget
>    * In Birmingham at least there is plenty of public service content
> being produced for free – there already is a rich online subculture
> that can be tapped into. The controller scours the local internet for
> text and images about things happening in the City, builds
> relationships with the authors and embed them in the site and in
> general curate local content. If the relationship is handled right and
> the project is generally non commercial people value the recognition
> and the shop window effect. The Guardian local websites in Cardiff,
> Edinburgh and Leeds are similar to this approach but without paying
> for video contributions.
> 
> Of the hundreds of good local websites in the UK very few regularly
> use video to tell stories. The weak track record of video in local
> newspapers also illustrates that in a constrained cost environment you
> don’t always need video to tell a story and hold people to account.
> Indeed one only rarely absolutely requires it – unless of course you
> run a TV station in which case you are locked into a high cost method
> of telling story.
> 
> Britain has vast regional film and video archive resources that can be
> deployed if archivists charge a realistic price as a public service
> (ie the marginal cost of digitisation which should be close a zero)
> and digitisation is done in an economic way – see Swindon Viewpoint’s
> superb home brewed online local TV archive.
> 
> There is a tension between sinking money into a few hours a day of
> video in a metropolitan area and using the same or smaller resource to
> provide or curate a full suite of content – video, audio, images, text
> on the internet. The local and national interests would be better
> served by the latter.
> 
> People don’t turn to TV for the sort of information they need locally
> –and haven’t done since the heady days of teletext. They turn to
> newspapers and the web.
> 
> Public service news done in the traditional British broadcast way is
> too expensive for local TV, as GMG Manchester experiment demonstrated.
> The IFNC process also showed that traditional British broadcast public
> service news providers are incapable of thinking outside of the
> regulatory box. New-ish entrants such as Ten Alps, PA, UTV and
> Tinoplis were by far the most promising. Alex Connock’s article on the
> similarities between commercial radio and local tv remains the best
> insight do far. It’s notable that ITN did not win any of the packages.
> The further one gets away from London the better the thinking gets.
> 
> Newspapers have not been able to demonstrate that they can
> consistently make useful video news that adds value or that people
> want to watch. Newspapers made a strategic mistake in ‘seeing-off’ the
> BBC in local news they now have little good video content they can
> run. The BBC is now uncharacteristically cowed in this space. However,
> the BBC does not do local news – it does regional news, as its flawed
> proposals for video showed. The sadly neglected BBC local radio
> provides a better model for local public service TV.
> 
> Technical quality can be reduced to save money. Engineering-led
> arguments about video production ‘quality’ are spurious – if technical
> quality were important to viewers no one would be watching YouTube.
> The Evolution of Dance has been watched over 300million times – yet
> the clips ‘production values’ are awful to the extent it is hard to
> see what is going on. The Dogme movement in film showed the huge
> potential of getting back to basics in filming and production.
> 
> Declarations: Elsewhere I have been involved in TV regulation on and
> off over the years – i was one of the authors of the 2000
> Communications White Paper and the 1996 Broadcasting Bill and one of
> Tony Blair’s media policy advisors from 2001-2004. I appointed by the
> last government to the IFNC panel.  I now run talk about local, a
> business that trains people in deprived communities to produce local
> websites as a public service funded by Channel4 through 4IP and Screen
> West Midlands.  I have a long history of local activism in London’s
> Kings Cross set up Kings Cross TV as a joke/experiment one afternoon
> in 2008.
> 
> Source: http://talkaboutlocal.org.uk/shott-review/
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