Isle of Wight Radio was sold to a Mainland company back in October 2012, so it’s not surprisingly given that they spoke about ‘benefiting from economies of scale’, that some changes are being made.
IW Radio have made an application (below) to Ofcom (who strictly regulate all UK radio stations), to reduce the number of hours of programmes that are made on the Island.
The proposed reductions
They want to be able to reduce those weekday hours by 30%, from 10 hours to seven per day.
The license would also allow them to produce only four hours of their Saturday and Sunday programming on the Isle of Wight.
Yesterday, we emailed Claire Willis , who runs the station, and will update this story when we hear back (Update 31 Mar 2014 – No reply has been received to date).
Update 31 Mar 2014 The request to reduce the number of hours of local programming was granted by Ofcom on 17 March 2014.
Cross network programming
The West Sussex-based company that bought Isle of Wight radio, Media Sound Holdings, operate four other radio stations – Arrow FM; bright FM; Sovereign FM; Splash FM.
Those stations feature the same presenter broadcasting the same shows simultaneously across all of those four station, with local adverts and travel information cut in, to make it feel local.
Isle of Wight Radio already has one of the same presenters, Anna Bingham, presenting a mid-morning show (10am – 2pm), the same as the rest of the network.
The Wikipedia entry for IW Radio says, “The station now broadcasts the mid-morning show from studios in Worthing, where Anna Bingham presents the show.” Without hearing back from IWR, it’s unclear if this is right or wrong.
The application
