ITV Local

» see itvlocal.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

ITV Local started in 2005 as a broadband trial in Brighton and Hastings, inside the Meridian region, at a point when British household bandwidth had just become good enough to make video on a website worth attempting. It worked well enough locally that ITV extended it across Meridian and then across the network, region by region, until the whole English map had a version of it.

What it offered was the regional news bulletin available whenever you wanted rather than at half past six. Around that sat the five day forecast, extended features that had been cut for time on air, entertainment listings, local sport, classified ads and jobs. There was a video upload page called YourNews, and there were live cameras pointed at pleasant views, which is a thing broadcasters kept doing online for about a decade before working out that nobody was watching.

On 4 March 2009 ITV announced that ITV Local would close as a separate business. It did so on 17 March, and the regional material moved under itv.com. The reasons given were the ones that were flattening every commercial broadcaster in Britain that year, an advertising market in free fall and a regional structure being consolidated at the same time. ITV's wider online misadventures were part of the shareholder mood, Friends Reunited above all, bought for a hundred and seventy five million pounds in 2005 and sold for twenty five in 2009.

This was a product about British postcodes and I have never had one. A service whose entire proposition is your local news in your region does not travel, which is not a complaint, it is the design working. The interesting part from a distance is that ITV built on demand regional video in 2005 and could not afford to keep it in 2009, which is a piece of timing rather than a piece of judgment.

~ the record ~

~ what it carried ~

The mix reads oddly now because it was two businesses sharing one page. Half of it was broadcast material moved online, the bulletins and the features. The other half was a local classifieds and listings portal, the kind of thing regional newspapers were also building at exactly that moment and also losing.

YourNews is the piece worth marking. A broadcaster inviting the public to upload video in 2005 or 2006 was ahead of the moment. YouTube was months old and the phrase user generated content was still mostly a conference word. ITV had a brand in every region and a mechanism for people to send in footage. It also had a share price and a recession coming.

~ the money that paid for it ~

Regional advertising was the thing paying for regional news, and by 2008 that money was going to search and to classified sites. ITV's response across the whole company was to reduce the number of regional news operations and merge the ones left. A separate online business built around regional identity cannot survive that decision, because the identity it was organized around was itself being consolidated.

So the closure took thirteen days from announcement to switch off, which tells you it was a line in a cost review rather than a product decision anyone agonized over. The audience did not lose the content, they lost the address. Everything that mattered turned up on itv.com, which is the tidiest ending available to a service like this and also the reason almost nobody noticed it had happened.

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