Virgin Media Television (formerly Flextech) is closing Trouble Homegrown, the user-generated content website allied with its Trouble youth TV channel. Trouble Homegrown launched online in the spring of 2006, allowing members to upload their own videos, and in November of that year launched what it claimed was the UK’s first user-generated TV show, outputting videos in a half-hour Trouble show.
Members of the site were notified by email that their videos and profiles would be transferred to the website for Virgin 1, VMtv’s entertainment TV channel due to launch on October 1.
VMtv told me this morning: “Homegrown will carry on as a brand, it just won’t be specific to Trouble. We are taking it up to a much bigger audience.” Will the web user-generated content now find its way on to Virgin 1, which Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) devised to supplant the loss of BSkyB’s (NYSE: BSY) Sky One channel? “Quite possibly”, VMtv said, adding the idea was always designed to have a strong TV element. This shows Virgin 1 delivering on the intention it stated, when announcing the channel in June, to “mix newly commissioned and acquired programming with user-generated content”.