Jiggery-pokery

Just a day after the BBC confirmed a launch date of February 2019 for its dedicated Scotland channel, STV has announced the closure of STV2.

Incoming STV CEO Simon Pitts launched a review of the fledging channel in March. Its output is built around never-ending repeats of Taggart and Peter and Roughie's Football Show, with quite a lot of news. It's lost £800,000 in a year. Pitts says "As a result of the challenging economics of local television and anticipated increased competition from BBC Scotland, we have taken the difficult decision to close our loss-making STV2 channel to focus our future content investment on STV and the STV Player."

25 jobs associated with the channel go, and another 34 in STV News, post closures which will save the business £2m a year. It puts some good staff on the market for the BBC. STV already held the local tv licences for Glasgow and Edinburgh, and bundled in Dundee, Aberdeen and Ayr when it started STV2, so there's five licences up for grabs. Quite what Ofcom will make of all this is unclear.