For Broadcast May 21, 2008

The cry of the big broadcasters seems to be: when in doubt, launch another channel. And so it is that SMG wants to launch a new channel by 2009/10, anchored with some 200,000 hours of programming from its video archives.

The golden oldie channel is a well-worn road for broadcasters and it can be useful, in this case expanding the advertising spots for a Scottish audience.

Given that STV is currently outperforming ITV in both national and regional TV ad sales this is an area that chief executive Rob Woodward is keen to build on. It's no secret that classic channel UKTV Gold brings in the most advertising of all its UKTV siblings.

With Virgin Radio and Pearl & Dean on the sales block, SMG's focus is on growing TV. Woodward has set a goal of increasing the company's current 20% share of the £90m regional ad spend to 25% by 2010. The increased viewership coming to its expanded and regionalised Scottish news bulletins seems to prove that hyper-local can pay off.

The Goldies channel is still in the R&D stage but it is a big part of SMG's submission to Ofcom about how it sees its PSB future.

Woodward told the audience at the AGM last week that he wants £15m of public money to launch the channel, not an unreasonable request given that the BBC Trust only recently approved a new Gaelic service (TV, online and radio) that will cost £20.8m per year.

That service is for the whopping 70,000 Gaelic speakers who live in the UK, whereas SMG will be targeting the more than 5 million Scots who live in Scotland.

Woodward takes it as a good sign that the SMG-managed scotlandontv.tv website saw its video downloads increase by 70% in the second half of last year to 46,000 a month.

But although SMG's stock price has moved up since it hit a 52-week low of just under 9p in April, there is still a lot of ground to make up. The question is whether a regional TV-only business has enough to get there.