10/01/2024

My first job at the age of nine or ten was working at the printing company where my mother was a typesetter deep in the mountains of Eryri (Snowdonia).

I would fold and staple copies of the local community newspaper 'Eco'r Wyddfa' (Snowdon's Echo), and still have the scar from those painful paper cuts.

 

Fifty years later, the publication is still going strong, produced by local people for local people.

After working in TV and advertising, much later I went on to found a company called Narrowstep, an early online video platform that supported narrowcasting - we helped launch narrow interest online channels for everything from cycling to scotch whisky, from the EU to extreme sports. There were many local channels, including a very successful one for Glasgow.

The premise was that we could replicate the news stand at WH Smiths but with online TV channels. The company was successful and we took it public on NASDAQ, but then Google bought a startup called YouTube and started to offer a rival service for free.

But this legacy left me with the feeling that there was an opportunity to create an online platform for channels aimed at community audiences.