The issue of local TV has cropped up again recently.
A couple of weeks back Will Perrin put some thoughts down, responding to government plans to encourage the development of up to twenty new local TV stations by 2015. The general gist of his post (although I’d encourage you to read it) was that there’s no need, it won’t work and, besides, the web would do the job better.
Nick Booth has built on this and claims that Birmingham’s informal, fledgling network of local, mainly volunteer-led news websites shows that people are already delivering the kind of activity Jeremy Hunt says he wants to encourage using TV stations (see Nick’s post for details).
My generally unconsidered view on this is that establishing a local TV station wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing – if someone (and I think City TV are still looking to get involved) can make the finances stack up and run something that doesn’t depend on handouts then great. It just doesn’t seem to be a particularly forward-thinking thing to spend public cash on.
If money/time/effort/attention/whatever is going to be spent on local media, I’d rather it was spent on getting people using the web and using it better – helping them access local information and publishing it themselves. There’s no reason video can’t be part of that – see I Am Birmingham for an example of someone using a website with a free template and a YouTube account to do regular-ish video content.
Also in the web’s favour – costs and barriers to entry are lower and the skills required are more readily transferrable. It’s also relevant to the government’s current strategy of closing down public services and replacing them with websites (Jobcentre Plus, Business Link and so on).
The whole ‘more TV by 2015’ thing bothers me too. 2015 is five years off. Bear in mid that YouTube is only five years old and you get a sense of how much things could change in the intervening years.
Anyway, I feel I’m starting to edge slightly further away from CiB-land now. If you want to get involved in the debate then see what people are saying on Will and Nick‘s posts.