Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

Birmingham’s City TV is first of Hunt’s local television networks to go bust.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/201...remy-hunt-bust

No surprise there as Local TV has been a disaster from the start.

Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

According to Boxnation Virgin Media don't want it as it's only a part time channel at the moment.

Boxnation and Talk Talk have agreed a deal that will see the channel launch prior to next months Mayweather Vs. Maidana clash. Will be interesting to see if it launches in HD on Talk Talk.

Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

HD streaming is being given to Premier Sports subscribers on the Sky platform. No news yet about this coming to VM customers but VM customers do pay £2pm less than Sky customers.
https://www.facebook.com/premierspor...type=1&theater

---------- Post added at 19:50 ---------- Previous post was at 19:48 ----------

Very much doubt it, all the pay-TV channels on TalkTalk including Sky Sports are in SD only.

Also interesting that the channel is not on BT given the fact that the head of BT Sport, Simon Green, is a director of BoxNation and used to be its chief executive.

Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

This was previously posted just before 6pm, but yes I do agree with you.

Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

Birmighmam City FC....**** me!

Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

Will it make main stream news tho or be brushed under den? I love the "American States have local news" argument but I believe the uk is smaller than every state ?

Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

What do you mean by size? I guess in terms of news you mean population size as precious little news occurs in uninhabited regions.
So, the UK population is 64m and the US 318.5m. The largest state in the USA is California with 38m people. The USA has a further 49 states. So, the UK is actually larger than every individual US state.

Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

The origins of cable tv were all about providing local services, but in most cases this never really materialised.

In my area 20+ years ago when cable tv started, we had a local teletext service which was run by the local college in partnership with the cableco. The plan was to turn this into a local tv channel and get funding through ads from all the local shops and other business'. But the cableco merged and merged again, until it was no longer interested in serving local services and it never happened. The college even had the tv studio and equipment all set up and ready to go. And their students studying journalism were to be the reporters and presenters and editors and producers etc

Why don't all these local channels contact the business' in their respective areas and get local ads to fund them?

Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

I think where it falls down is in the fact that "community" is no longer really based on geographical location - especially in our towns and cities, most of which are wonderfully diverse.

More appealing, commercially, would be channels which cater specifically for the needs of individual communities, but they would perhaps merely serve to entrench community divisions rather than encourage integration. And besides, they already exist. Local tv wasn't, rather isn't, supposed to be commercially attractive - it's partly funded for that very reason - it's supposed to provide what the BBC is seriously failing to provide, which is proper local public service broadcasting. Unfortunately it's come about just as televisual viewing habits are slowly starting to change.

Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

Cable operators also had a statutory requirement to provide a local television channel, but this was dropped at some point in the nineties around the time of the big mergers.

Bell Cablemedia in East London had a scrolling information service filled with out-of-date information then for one week a year they would put out some programmes just to fulfil the legal requirements.

Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

I can remember when I was young we had Redifusion cable tv and they would flash any news from the area which needed the local people to know,i.e a flood warning.

Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

Local newspapers struggle to get local companies to buy ads in their papers, even less companies would be able to afford ads on local tv unless they undercut the already rock bottom newspaper ads prices

Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

It being list as Saturday August 16th at 6am to 6am the next day.

But Virgin may end it early.

Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

I remember on CableTel and NTL Analogue, they used to cut away from the normal adverts on channels like Nickelodeon and showed really low budget local adverts. I don't know how they were allowed to do it really as I would have thought the normal advertisers on these channels would get annoyed unless they only paid for their adverts to be shown on Sky.

Re: Coming Soon to Virgin TV (2014) Vol. 3
 

Thanks for info.