ITV Local
July 18, 2006 Posted by carolhayward in : Digital Challenge, Bristol, Community Media, Media , trackbackYesterday (17th July), we had a presentation from ITV about ITV Local. ITV have been running a pilot for local TV in the Meridian area which covers quite a large chunk of southern England. They started in Brighton and Hastings about 8 months ago but have now expanded to cover about 12 cities/towns in the area. The BBC have been running a similar pilot in the Midlands for a similar period of time.
For the ITV pilot, the idea is that news items are collected for towns or neighbourhoods within the pilot area which runs alongside community generated content. There’s also weather, what’s on, forums and classified adverts. At the moment, people send in their content and ITV encode it but they’re aiming to make this simpler and a bit more like youtube. Unlike Youtube, material is checked for decency etc before publication.
Since the pilot started, around 400 videos have been uploaded, 75,000 people looked at the site during June and as many people watched during the day (12-6pm) as in the evening (6-12midnight).
Unfortunately at the moment, ITV Local works best with Microsoft products and doesn’t work well on Macs or on Mozilla but there are plans to tackle this.
There are other areas that are still being worked out - eg licences for the community generated content (which will possibly be creative commons) and what aspects to charge for which I’m sure will be resolved before ITV Local is rolled out around the rest of the country. We are hoping to hear in the next few weeks what the timetable will be for our area but once this issues are overcome, I felt this was a very positive opportunity that could work well alongside our other digital challenge activities.
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