Fortunately for Kent council, the spectre of their disastrous experiment, has faded to the background, even though it's still possible to catch a glimpse of past experiment through their digital Kent site, which for some reason nobody a Kent County Council are willing to talk about.
Briefly Kent TV, was an experiment in communication which never lived up to the fantastic vision of highly paid officers, despite KCC digging deep into taxpayers pockets, and spending two million quid, and flashing as I understand the KCC credit card, to promote Kent TV on Google search engine.
Whatever induced the Kent Conservative group, lead by Cllr Paul Carter to go along with such wasteful spending, is beyond my comprehension, still what can you expect of a council that stumbles from crisis to crisis and claims to perform excellently, despite losing £50 million in Iceland ( yeah I know it going to be recovered any day) or worse failing our children and then not investigating the root cause?
Even here in Thanet we've seen experiments in community TV like this "Champions TV" it was apparently launched with £100,000 of Government money as far as I can tell, this just flickered for a month or two and gradually faded, a bit like the spot on those black and white tellys of my childhood. Unfortunately the Champions website has disappeared still this blog site still remains and a twitter account.
A couple of examples of community or local broadcast experiments which didn't succeed anyhoo the government believe that there is room for a fresh approach, frankly I'd prefer if they didn't nick money that would otherwise go to the BBC.
I understand that the 40 million is for start up costs, Kent TV was going to generate income and well it never did, did it? The government have foolishly identified Dover, Maidstone and Tonbridge as possible locations for this nonsense, clearly nobody at the department of culture, media, sport has ever read Bignews Margate.
Surely if KCC and TenAlps couldn't make Kent TV, a success what chance anyone else?
Hundred Grand! Champions TV never heard of it
ReplyDeleteJust because KCC and it chosen partner were unable to generate revenues to make Kent TV self financing does not mean that other companies will also fail in the provision of local TV. KCC mismanaged this project from the start, hidden costs not published, a board with more members from the old boys network than teeth, false statements from the then MD and his sidekick claimimg £1 millions of savings made at KCC, extension of the contract unchanged when it was clear all was not well and content the Kent public did not want like out of date news.
ReplyDeleteKCC also took on 4 of the contractors staff under TUPPE was he station closed, what was that all about?
Its not as though the technology is ground breaking so under different circumstances maybe the costs can be controlled and revenues generated for it to work.
They are too busy learning how to apply their make-up to find out.
ReplyDelete