A Year on, What Actually is TalkTV?

As the station turns one, it still seems somewhat confused.

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TalkTV turns one year old today. The channel, part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, launched with a bang - an attention grabbing interview with Donald Trump - but then it hit some turbulence. 

That’s not to say it has not had an impact during its first year of existence. There have been some major guests on Piers Morgan’s show that have caused a stir. Most notable was a sit down with Christiano Ronaldo, which, like the Trump interview, ran over two nights and led to the end of the Portuguese footballer’s second spell at Manchester United.

At its best, TalkTV can deploy the full resources of parent company NewsUK and dominate the agenda. Too often, though, it fades into irrelevance. There have been reports of certain hours recording zero viewers.

Twelve months on, it is not clear that TalkTV knows what it wants to be. Recently, it sent out a press release boasting that “Piers Morgan Uncensored” had hit 1 million YouTube subscribers. In the statement, Morgan said: 

I’m absolutely delighted to hit such an amazing milestone so fast. When we launched Piers Morgan Uncensored, I said I wanted it to become the world’s top interview show, watched around the globe on multiple platforms, and this shows we’re well on the way to achieving that goal.

Getting a million subscribers is no mean feat, but it is one that a number of independent YouTubers have achieved (although often in more than a year). I’m also not sure that getting YouTube subscribers was the reason Murdoch launched a UK news channel. Undoubtedly everyone involved wanted TalkTV to cause a splash on social media, but surely they also wanted a win on linear TV? The fact that there are statements welcoming social media numbers, and Morgan often highlights them on Twitter, says a lot.