Minister defends move to ditch TV network

London: Jeremy Hunt, the UK culture secretary, has defended his decision to ditch a proposed new national TV network to provide a "spine" for a new generation of local services, saying it would have added considerably to start-up costs.

Addressing the final seminar on the government's local TV plans in London earlier this month, Hunt said that each of the new local services would have faced start-up costs of about £2 million (Dh11.5 million) if the national network had been launched. Under the revised plan, the government estimates each local TV service will have annual operating costs of about £500,000 (Dh2.8 million.) The culture secretary dropped the new national network proposal in July, deciding instead to provide bidders with digital terrestrial TV spectrum.

"I started very attracted to the idea of this spine and I was really modelling it on the American system.

"The reason that I moved away from that is not that I don't believe in the benefits of a network [of local affiliates], the trouble is by starting as a spine you have to cover all the costs of a national network, you then have to access spectrum that would be much, much more expensive," he said.

You push up the costs of the operation right from the very start to close to £2 million per city. I believe that was making it harder for local TV to get off the ground from the start. Nothing's perfect but that was the reason."

The government last month revealed the 65 areas where it will be possible to free up digital TV spectrum to launch the local media ventures. Licences for 20 of the channels will be awarded next summer, with the majority in operation by 2015.

Hunt's ambitious local media plans have been plagued by concerns that they are not technically or financially viable.

The government estimates that each channel will cost £500,000 a year to run, based on one hour of news coverage a day and advertising revenue of £10,000 (Dh57,517) a week.

Hunt conceded £500,000 is an average estimate, adding costs would be higher for inner city stations providing more than one hour of news coverage a day, and lower for rural services producing less output.

"I do accept that these are challenging businesses to get off the ground, so I don't want to be too proscriptive," the Tory minister said. "We've never had this before… [the stations] will come in different shapes and sizes, so we want to be light touch."

Hunt added residents of sizeable areas that will not be able to receive local TV stations due to technical issues relating to lack of available spectrum, could still make use of internet TV, which he envisages could carry local media content to nine out of ten UK homes.