A historic day for the Standard and London as capital gets its own TV station

4 February 2013

Evening Standard Television has won the licence to run a new digital TV channel for Londoners, it was announced today.

The broadcasting regulator Ofcom said the bid to operate the channel, called London Live, had beaten off competition from four other applicants.

Ofcom said the bid from ESTV Ltd, wholly owned by the Standard and Independent’s proprietor, Evgeny Lebedev, had “demonstrated the greatest understanding of London’s diverse communities” and provided “important opportunities for close local community involvement”.

Mr Lebedev said: “I am absolutely delighted that Ofcom has awarded us this opportunity to give Londoners their own high-quality local television channel.

“Our excellent team of journalists in the capital have the best contacts, knowledge and understanding of the London scene. Through the Evening Standard and Independent, we have proved time and again that we can deliver fast, accurate, high-quality breaking news, features and analysis, and we are looking forward to applying these skills to London Live.

“Our success in this bid is a testament to my management team here and the staff across both newspapers."

The channel, the first dedicated to the capital, will broadcast 18 hours a day with a minimum of four and a half hours of London news and one hour of current affairs programming. There will be news bulletins every half hour and 33 “hyper-local” internet TV streams from each London borough.

London Live will use the award-winning editorial teams of the Standard and the Independent to bring coverage of a range of subjects from politics to the City and from crime to West End theatre to up to four million viewers. The main studio will be based in the Standard’s newsroom in Kensington.

The interactive channel will use split-screen technology to show instant reaction to news from social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

It has already been confirmed that the channel will be broadcast on Freeview, Sky, Virgin and IPTV, with other digital platforms planned.

Sarah Sands, editor of the Evening Standard, said: “This is a historic day for the Evening Standard and we are tremendously proud to be given the opportunity to bring London to life not only in print and online but now on screen, too.