But Ofcom, in its submission to the Department for Media, Culture & Sport’s consultation on the idea, warns that a more “localised” option - in which consortium partners provide multimedia, online news for specific towns and communities - will cost between £60 million and £100 million a year nationally, funded from £130 million in licence fee money set aside for the digital switchover. A service which just replaces ITV’s regional TV news will cost between £40 million and £60 million.

Would-be consortium partners are warned that just to replicate one ITV regional news service would cost up to £4 million a year today—so they may well have to raise money themselves through TV advertising and licensing content. Ofcom estimates that, if the status quo remains, ITV will be losing £64 million a year on regional news by 2012.

In a separate document laying bare the crisis in local/regional publishing in all media, Ofcom spells out how the IFNC system might work…

—Regional and local news made by professional organisations and published across TV, online text, online video and possibly even print.
—There will be “new opportunities for partnerships between local newspapers and other organisations, including the BBC, and to create new commercial and community options for localness in television, radio and on the internet”.
—Amateur news groups and community organisations would contribute to and have access to news content.

The document suggests that “digitally stored” online video news could be made available to non-consortium members via the BBC iPlayer; the Press Association has already offered to allow its text and video wires to be the standard distribution channels for IFNC PSB content. Ofcom’s consortium response (pdf).