Talk Radio TV is so "low rent" that it could not merge with GB News - in terms of format or personnel - where are the sofas? - and where are the right wing black presenters? And the right-wing vicars and former chaplains to Her Majesty? The average age of the Talk TV presenters must be 25 years older than GB News. Not complaining about age obviously, but the ambience is quite different. Talk TV seems to be aimed at former patrons of working men's clubs, whereas GB News is some weird specie of Unherd meets truth-telling anti-vaxxers. Different beasties.
I guess the Queen of TTV is Julia Hartley-Brewer - but even she is just a video radio phone in.
Piers Morgan is never there when you expect him - his agent provocateur slot seems to be being usurped by Richard Tice. The only time I ever saw anything dynamic on TTV was Piers Morgan presenting the Boris Meltdown show when resignations were coming in hand over fist. At least GB News can rustle up a (somewhat bad taste) discussion of Magical Realism in the context of Salman Rushdie's stabbing off the cuff. Bad taste because for some reason GB News employs middle aged "edgy" comedians to review "The Papers".
That's all assuming TalkTV will continue in it's present form, I don't think it will, so assuming it's not just closed down, the only option is a total re-launch. The radio to TV format just doesn't work, hence outside the 15 hours of 'made for TV' programmes, TalkTV often gets a zero audience rating from BARB, because too few are watching to measure, they're lucky if they hit 2k in a given hour. Mind you, so is 'The Newsdesk' lucky to hit 2k, and that is 'made for TV'.
There's so many options, depending on how much Murdock wants his prize, and how much he's willing spend, but something like this isn't impossible.
TalkTV 'mergers' with GB News.
TalkTV & Talk Radio are separated, rebrand the TV service as TalkNews (the merged name).
Close GB News, saving transmission/platform costs, and selling off valuable bits like the Freeview slot, but keep the DAB radio slot for TalkNews.
TalkNews expands as a TV channel, bringing in the well known and better GBN presenters, to cover 6am to midnight, take Talk Radio overnight as a sustaining service.
Stick loons like Farage and Wootton on TalkRadio, where they would fit in easily with their other loons, keeping TalkNews more sane and attractive to TV advertisers.
Advantages - you get one fairly strong TV channel, TalkNews, with much more advertising revenue, because TalkTV hasn't suffered a boycott by any big brands, and all their ad breaks are 3 minutes rather than just 2 on GB News.
Plus three radio channels, TalkRadio, TalkNews (at bugger all cost), Times Radio, all aimed at different markets. Oh, of course, TalkSport & Virgin Radio too.
My thinking is that TalkRadio, whilst still losing money, has seen quarter by quarter increases in listeners, from around 450k in Sept, 2021, RAJAR's first quarterly report since before covid, to almost 700k in the June 2022, worth leaving that to grow by itself and not ruin it by putting more 'made for TV' content on it.
As I've said the radio to TV format doesn't work, however GBN has had some success putting TV on the radio, with almost 230k listeners in their first & second quarters, and clearly not taking them from TalkRadio, so that can be built on, trouble is it's losing them money, whereas it would instantly make money for Murdoch.
I've just checked GBN Radio and they still have very little advertising despite appointing Bauer Media months ago as their sales house, on TV there was 4 x 30 second ads, whereas it was one on the radio and three promos for GBN. Now Murdoch has his own radio sales team, who could easily fill all those ad slots almost over night, just bundle up the combined listeners to TalkRadio & TalkNews and sell them as a package, bugger all costs involved, but bringing in more revenue than the DAB radio transmission costs for TalkNews, instantly changing it from losing money to producing revenue for the TV side.
You knock out a competitor, you increase the combined TV advertising revenue, and you also increase radio advertising revenue, that's a 'win, win, win' outcome to me. Overall the combined operation would probably still be losing money, but it would be a lot less than TalkTV & GBN are currently losing, and you're in a much stronger position going forward.
www.gbnews.uk
www.bloomberg.com
) couldn't possibly be a holocaust denier.
