London Gets a TV Channel

Claiming to be the first channel of its type in the world, London TV is a new channel designed to help Londoners get the most out of their city.

NOP have carried out a survey citing 33% of Londoners “worry constantly that they are not making the most of their free time”. I must be in that other 77% slice, presumably.

The channel revolves around “bite-sized” (i.e. short and cheap to produce) snippets of entertainment designed to inspire Londoners to get over their fear of mugging and burglary and to leave their ludicrously priced homes and venture out for some fun.

David Campbell, chief executive of Visit London, said: “If you live in the capital, you often feel guilty that you’re not making the most of everything the city has to offer. Now you don’t even have to get off the sofa to get some inspirational ideas delivered straight to your living room. London TV provides one of the best ways to deliver up to the minute information in a fast moving city like ours. Television brings the capital to life in a way that a guide book could never do and with digital uptake increasing all the time, there has never been a better time to launch a channel dedicated to the greatest city in the world.”

The channel has cost some UK£2 million (€3 million) to set up, financed through Visit London’s marketing budget.

Visit London

Published by

Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?