please empty your brain below
I check its listings more than I do ITV1...
Perhaps it needs a series on Bus stops at Bow Church ! ;o))
Londoners love angst-riddden opportunities to talk about how terrible it is to live there, and yet strangely better at the same time than everywhere else in the country.
Should get everyone flooding it.
[Born in East Dulwich hospital, brought up in London for 18 years, never going back, just in case anyone wants to attack the messenger!]
dg writes: Sorry, I can't count. Fixed, thanks.
Gosh, 9.5 million for Call the Midwife: that is quite good these days, isn't it?
All the ITV and BBC regions are available from satellite on FreeSat or Sky and if you are not in London and want to watch London Live put your Freesat box into non-Freesat mode and you will see London Live plus all the BBC and ITV regional transmissions listed and can view them.
On terrestrial DTV (FreeView) London Live is only on London based transmitters for example Crystal Palace.
I still watch London Live, but then the only TV I tend to watch is Local news or old films.
Most TV output isn't worth spending my free time on.
Local TV has been tried many times in this country, and has pretty much always been a disaster. At the same time as Jeremy Hunt (for it is he who came up with the idea, and I think we can see how good his ideas are by the fact he's managed to right-royally annoy a group not well known for striking - doctors) was trumpeting this 'bold vision', one of the early local channels - Channel M in Manchester - was closing down because they couldn't make it work.
For me that said it all. If Channel M - which had been around for years and was based in a big city - couldn't work, then what chance at all was there of local TV working anywhere?
London Live will probably limp on for a bit longer. It may even make a profit soon. But it's value to London is clearly low.
Very worthy, no doubt, but what is needed is a London version of Private Eye's 'Rotten Boroughs' with the spotlight on, yes, housing, and transport, and population, and threats to parks and open spaces and the Green Belt, and the unpleasant cuts that are being made to public services in the name of 'austerity'. Real 'local news' about the whole of London.
It's nothing but nervously read news (Solent News Now) and faltering interviews (Talk Solent) during the day, and repeats of the "highlights" of those in the evening.
Think yourself lucky.
Unless of course it's just so Jeremy Hunt can reserve a channel on the Freeview EPG that will then be quietly bought up and merged into one nationwide conglomerate, as happened with local radio.
dg writes: Read the post. Please read the post.
The news isn't local, unless you live in Evening Standard land. i.e. A very small circle around Kensington High Street.
It just seems to completely ignore the fact that London in 2015 is a very diverse, multi everything society...
There have been some wonderful "forgotten" films but finding out what's on when is difficult.
The other problem is that the ad breaks can be truly awful and combined with the station's own trails they just don't fit the older material.
These were broadcast last year Fascinating extracts are still on their website...
http://www.londonlive.co.uk/search?keyword=BFI+London
http://www.londonlive.co.uk/programmes/bfi-london-the-vanishing-street
@ John
You can't watch London Live (or any of the other local TV stations) via satellite unless you have a Sky subscription.
This crazy rule is Ofcom's fault: they insist that the local TV stations are encrypted. It's as if they want them all to fail.
Hunt famously asked why there was local TV in Birmingham, Alabama but in Birmingham, West Midlands. But of course there *is* local TV there. Both ITV and BBC1 run local news bulletins. There may well be four or five such channels in a US TV market, but the rest of the time, those channels are either running network offerings or syndicated repeats (with perhaps some local sport).
I'd be amazed if any of these UK local services make any money once the subsidies stop - the BBC has to buy programming from these stations, but you'll be doing well to find it used anywhere.
The only service that might be making some money is STV Glasgow, which is able to fill its schedule with old STV programming and share STV's news resources to get more localised bulletins.
The whole thing was a white elephant from the very start.
The size of the UK marketplace means that local TV stations can't afford more popular repeats - hence the reliance on older C4 programmes and cheap films. The person I feel most sorry for at the Standard is whoever has to find something to "highlight" each day on London Live!
The reason that there are stats for London Live's viewership is because the channel chose to go into BARB - the industry measurement system. That costs a significant amount of money, and because the survey is primarily designed to record national viewership it's a risky thing to do. That said, the sample size for London should be large enough to be reasonably accurate. However other channels would be very foolish to pay for measurement. There are only about 5,500 BARB households that measure TV viewing across the entire country. So when you get down to a single city, your sample is going to be small. Therefore Mustard TV quite rightly doesn't bother with them since there may be as few as 12 homes in Norwich measuring TV viewing (calculated roughly on a pro-rata period).
In addition Wikipedia tells me that it provided experience to lots of newcomers to the TV industry. However, it seems that the original owners sold out to investors with ambitions to expand to other cities, such as Reading and Portsmouth, and the station eventually collapsed. So even in the era of only 5 TV channels (for many) it's clearly hard to sustain a local channel of this type without the right kind of enthusiasm and support.
I watch London Live with a very old Sky Box and no subscription. Seems that as long as you have a card in the box (paid for or not) it decrypts the signal, as the channel is "Free to View", but not "Free to Air". So Island Dweller would need to get an old Sky box, with a card to watch. Only Sky boxes have the decrypter. May need a card from the London area, but he would not have to pay money to Murdoch.
I will not miss BBC3, although I hope that all TV channels do not eventually migrate to "on line only", which is much cheaper for the broadcaster.
Another fairly new channel that,like London Live shows old British films, is "Talking Pictures TV".
that also has an oddity with its transmission, you can get on Sky (free) and Freesat, but only on Freeview if you have an HD Freeview box, although the channel is not HD.
How things have changed since we had one channel, BBC TV. I am one of the many who first watched TV in 1953 for the Coronation. Now channels seem to come and go, but the same content gets repeated among them. So I do not watch.
I like TV for local news, and the Evening Standard I read every day. BBC Radio London does not give much local news, and LBC, has become a national station. So I hope London Live keeps going.
I agree the rest of the channel seems missable.
dg writes: I've spotted London Live listings in the Radio Times, just to the right of Channel 5 (from next week, just to the right of BBC4).
All so different from when the nation would sit in their living rooms to watch Alf Garnett. Makes me feel sorry for programme makers competing in such a diverse environment . May I recommend Toast (the first two series are the best) ?
Thanks for the clarification that London Live is Free to View. Apparently the local TV stations have to be encrypted because the Powers That Be are terrified that they'd show blockbusters that would attract a national audience and make the Big Boys fret.
But it seems stupid that the scrambling isn't switched off for the local news and current affairs programmes which are the stations' raisons d'être. Apart from disenfranchising people like me who have a TV with a built-in satellite receiver but no aerial, set top box or decoder, it also excludes people who have moved out of the area but still wish to stay in touch.
Local TV seems like a licence to lose money so it needs all the friends and help it can get. Sadly, The Independent is about to vanish from the newsagents, and presumably London Live is at risk of disappearing from our TV screens before very long. With friends like Ofcom, who needs enemies?
I would have abandoned it even sooner if I didn't entertain the idea of having a go at making some sort of documentary myself someday.
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