In Canada, historically local television stations produced a significant volume of local programming, including newscasts, locally or regionally oriented talk shows, and variety entertainment programs such as Tiny Talent Time or Homegrown Cafe; a few stations, such as CHCH-TV in Hamilton, Ontario and CJOH in Ottawa, also distributed some of their local programming more widely through television syndication, most notably CHCH's Hilarious House of Frightenstein and CJOH's You Can't Do That on Television, both of which were broadcast across both Canada and the United States.
With the cross-national consolidation of Canadian media ownership in the 1990s and 2000s, network-affiliated stations now rarely produce much more than their own local or regional newscasts, although some stations may continue to produce a small amount of additional local programming. Independent stations may produce more local programming, although such stations are now rare in the Canadian media landscape.
In radio, virtually all Canadian commercial radio stations are officially programmed locally, although many stations cut costs by contracting some dayparts out to voice-tracked hosts who are not actually located in the station's physical studio or even necessarily in the same city, using a home studio, and may even be performing their show from the United States. The CBC Radio One, CBC Radio 2, Ici Radio-Canada Première and Ici Musique networks consist primarily of networked national programming, although all include some degree of local programming in certain time blocks. Radio One and Première stations have a significant number of production centres which create and air their own local morning and/or afternoon talk shows, while Radio 2's and Ici Musique's local content is limited to local news and weather updates.
The term is also generally accepted to refer to television programming that is not produced by a broadcast or other media source for national or international distribution (broadcast syndication). Usually programming of local interest is produced by either a Public, educational, and government access (PEG) television organization, cable TV operator or broadcast network affiliate stations that offer local radio news and television news.
Additionally, the term is used in a more generic form in the United States, Canada, Mexico and other countries in the Western Hemisphere as a placeholder term within published national program guide listings in publications such as the post-2006 format TV Guide or USA Today which only carry the default schedules of national networks, where the "local programming" designation replaces detailed listings for a local station that would be impossible to print in a national publication. Outside of local newscasts and some rare non-news programming however, the term merely describes time periods under a local station's control, where syndicated content airs rather than true local programming. For equivalent electronic program guide listings for set-top boxes, the term is used mainly with PEG stations and networks which do not have a schedule compiled by a cable operator as a default placeholder; other instances are with only broadcast stations who outright refuse or do not release their program listings due to lack of staff, though as advertisers usually demand a minimum schedule to place their ads on a television station (and most of these stations are associated with smaller national digital subchannel networks which do provide a default schedule for distribution), the vast majority of broadcast stations do provide program listings. Wikipedia itself also uses this designation in its series of American network television schedule articles for non-network programming time.
Main article: Restricted Service Licence
Main article: Local television in the United Kingdom
Many local television stations in the United Kingdom ceased broadcasting due to a lack of viability, but some stations are still being broadcast, including:
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