Scottish Broadcasting Company

15/03/2025

Haven't posted in a long time. However there's been a lot of work behind the scenes. A legal appeal against the UK broadcast regulator Ofcom has been submitted to the Competition Appeals Tribunal for a number of breaches of its statutory duty. An appeal to help support the legal costs has been launched. If you can help please do. Everyone who donates £20 or more will be invited to the new SBC TV Channel launch party expect in 2026.

I have submitted an appeal against the UK broadcast regulator for their failure to prevent 5 Local TV broadcast licenses breaching the law.

10/04/2024

An important legal complaint to be submitted against decisions made by Ofcom shortly. Local TV that is anything but local and with no benefit to the local communities while being in breach of the minimum local programme commitments.

As some of you will know I have experience of these procedures. Scotland needs a real PSB TV channel.

05/03/2024

The Scottish Broadcasting Company SBC TV will soon announce its plan to launch a Scottish PSB TV Channel. Details will follow.

19/01/2024

I've been working on a Scottish PSB TV channel since 2018 if not before. Sadly STV Group sold its 5 Scottish L-DTPS licenses to That's TV Broadcasting Limited in 2018 without any open bidding process. Since then there has been no attempt to deliver the minimum localness programming that STV promised in their original license applications to Scottish audiences. In fact there has been no attempt to invest or even market a local TV channel in Scotland.

Scottish arts, culture and local news has suffered as a result. In fact local TV has not been allowed to deliver its potential. A handful of local tv channels have delivered for the local communities but the 2 big local TV operators have not. Instead a diet of old programmes and music videos have been used to fill the schedules all while the regulator turns a blind eye to the clear breaches of the original license conditions. Localness was the central purpose of the local TV licenses.

A number of small operators have created local TV channels but Sky has not been helpful by implementing a Conditional Access requirement to list a Local PSB TV channel on the Sky EPG. This again is while the regulator has failed to act to prevent the abuse of a dominant market position. Why for instance did Sky not allow the local TV channels to be Free To Air on the Sky EPG to reduce costs? Or provide without charge satellite capacity?

London Live reports a profit and is the only Local TV channel now listed on Sky on channel 117. It does of course cover a sizeable audience.

The Conservative government created the local TV regulatory system but they didn't provide any long term funding for the PSB content production. While the collects £3.2 Billion a year and wastes vast sums on non essential services such as and which could be provided by commercial competitors, so clearly some of that TV License could be used to support PSB content producers. Its in the public interest to have more sources of news, not more news from the same sources.

Perhaps 2024 will see some changes in the UK local TV services?

Local TV could be a quality source of local news and entertainment but not if operators don't invest in localness and the government fails to support long term funding for PSB content.