Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV is bidding farewell to traditional television and moving online as it struggles to win over eyeballs that are glued to rival GB News.
From early summer, the News UK spin-out broadcaster will operate as live streaming news and opinion channel, using various streaming platforms including Amazon Fire, Samsung, LG and Youtube, where it currently has 812,000 subscribers.
Scott Taunton, TalkTV’s president of broadcasting, said the channel needs to adapt to the way consumption of news is shifting online “as a priority”.
“We are therefore intending that Talk comes off linear television from early summer and our focus will be on streaming,” he wrote in an internal memo to staff.
“A large proportion of our live viewing is already through streaming on televisions and we intend to continue to grow this. Clips will continue to be shared through social media.
“There is no doubt over Talk’s future as an audio and video channel, it just won’t be distributed on linear,” Taunton added.
It comes just weeks after Piers Morgan took his daily TalkTV show, Uncensored, to Youtube.
Commenting on the decision, a News UK source said Rebekah Brooks, who has been chief of the media group since 2015, “isn’t exactly crying her eyes out.”
“She made it clear she was a Talk TV sceptic from the start and wouldn’t be taking any of the blame when it collapsed.
“Also, she had been wise enough to move some dead wood from across the company’s newspaper titles to Talk TV at the outset, in the expectation it would be easier to show these people the door altogether when it eventually collapsed.”
Staff at TalkTV will undergo a restructuring process due to the proposed creation of News Studios, which will make content for all News UK’s brands such as The Sun and The Times.
Murdoch-owned News UK made a £34m loss during 2022- TalkTV’s first year.
But Taunton said the move to digital “makes economic sense too” as advertising revenues will never surpass the cost of linear TV slots, which amount to millions a year.
TalkTV’s audience averaged just 11,100 in January, according to figures from ratings body Barb, compared to more than 58,000 for GB News.
The channel’s radio station, which has 725k listeners, will continue as normal.