At midnight on Sunday, London Live, the capital’s dedicated TV channel and crown jewel of Jeremy Hunt’s strategy to populate the UK with dozens of local TV stations, will cease broadcasting after a little over a decade.

Back in 2010, the then Conservative culture secretary’s local TV plan was criticised as financially unviable by much of the media industry, but London was the exception.

The licence for the capital was seen as the most lucrative to be awarded since Channel 5 in 1997. It was the subject of a hotly contested bidding battle won by Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Independent newspaper and the London Standard, formerly the Evening Standard.

A star-studded launch party in 2014 counted David Cameron, George Osborne, Elizabeth Hurley, Hugh Grant, Naomi Campbell, Ralph Fiennes, Tracey Emin and Anna Friel among the guests.

Hunt stood by his strategy, which was backed with up to £40m of funding from the BBC’s licence fee, criticising what he called the “Westminster media world’s” desire to write off the network as a “local yokel station” and argued the idea of one not being sustainable in London was “bonkers”.

However, for the now Lord Lebedev, the losses quickly mounted, at one point reaching more than £30m in total, and over the years London Live has been subjected to rounds of cuts and submissions to the media regulator Ofcom to water down its local content obligations.

Having looked to sell up in 2019, Lebedev finally pulled the plug on the business earlier this month, cutting all 25 staff and selling the licence to Local TV, which is controlled by the National World chief executive, David Montgomery.

Announcing the deal, London Live’s chief executive, Tim Kirkman, said the business had proved that a high quality and profitable London TV station could work.

However, the most recent accounts for 2023 show a 75% plunge in profits to just £746,000, and an almost halving of revenues, with Lebedev racking up a loss of about £24m after a decade in the broadcasting business.

“When local TV licences were issued there was still a lot of local advertising, but that has all gone online,” said Lesley Mackenzie, the chief executive of Local TV, who has previously held senior roles at Sky, Amazon and News Corp.

“London Live maybe didn’t change with the times. Five years ago, I went digital first, we have a very different model to London Live which was studio-based.”

Local TV has been scrambling to seamlessly replace London Live’s broadcast feed and the channel name will change on Freeview, Sky and Virgin – where it is broadcast just to London viewers – to London TV at midnight on Sunday.

On Monday morning, breakfast viewers will be introduced to a new presenter, senior video journalist Lauren Tiller, who will be the anchor of all London news programmes, including London News at 6.

London TV comprises a team of seven, with two out daily filming stories, and has said it will cover news, sports and entertainment in the capital.

While many of the original local TV licensees have gone out of business, or been sold into bigger groups, such as That’s TV, which controls more than 20 local licences, Mackenzie said Local TV has been able to make it work commercially without having to significantly cut back on local news provision.

Local TV, which owns nine licences, including in Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds and Liverpool, airs two hours of local news at breakfast, one hour at lunch, and two more hours in the evening.

In between those bulletins, it broadcasts syndicated non-local content. The company has a deal with US broadcaster CBS to show general entertainment focused on crime shows across all nine TV stations in the evenings.

“Most of the services are becoming, or have become, much less local but we have kept the spirit of what Ofcom wanted,” Mackenzie said. “Local TV was never envisaged to be all local content 24 hours a day.”

Mackenzie added that while Local TV was making a £5m loss when she joined in 2017, it has been profitable for the last two years.

Last year, Ofcom extended the current licences for local TV operators to the end of 2026. By the end of March, all operators have to submit their plans to Ofcom, which has indicated concerns over the cutting back of local content. Ofcom will then assess whether to renew each station’s licence to 2034.

“I think there is a need for local TV,” said Mackenzie. “We are not all going to be made millionaires from it, but there is a need for it.”