When the annual celebration of multicultural London stomps through Notting Hill next August it will, for the first time, be played out on a free-to-air TV channel dedicated entirely to the capital. Billing itself as "modern, urban, celebratory and knowing", the festival promises to be a centrepiece event for London Live, the sister station of the Evening Standard, following its launch in March.

It may be too soon for Vikki Cook, the channel's head of news and current affairs, to reveal how London Live will cover the carnival, but she hopes her station will be in full swing when the festival drums strike up. "We intend to be as noisy as hell come March next year, we really will," she says. "We will be the biggest media launch next year without a doubt."

London Live has kept its plans firmly under wraps since it won the hotly-contested battle for the capital's local TV licence in February. It promises five-and-a-half hours of news a day, at least one hour of original current affairs programming and a documentary strand to showcase digital filmmakers. Last week the channel announced it is recruiting 50 people, including on-air talent and producers, to fill its as-yet-unfurnished studios in Derry Street, west London. The channel may also feature surprise cameos from Evening Standard and Independent journalists, more than 100 of whom signed up for screen tests earlier this summer.

Cook does not reveal whether her Britain's Got Talent-style auditions have discovered unlikely stars at the Standard, but says there is some "really surprising talent" among the print hacks. "It's very easy to go shop for a big names and that's attractive for all sorts of companies. But we don't want to parachute in someone else's brand, we want to build our own brands with new talent."

Cook, who bristles at the description of London Live as the Evening Standard on television, says the channel's on-air faces will give it a "very distinctive look" compared to rivals BBC London News and ITV's London Tonight. While the schedules are still being drawn up, she is keen for her channel to depart from the "slightly staid" running order of her competitors. "I think we have the luxury of having a lot of fluidity with our schedules, as opposed to other London stations," she says. "I want some big noisy campaigns about issues that Londoners care about and that are fun. There has to be an element of fun and cheekiness in everything we do. I have a mantra: it cannot be 'WBD' – worthy but dull."

Bankrolling the venture is the Russian tycoon, Alexander Lebedev, and his son, Evgeny. The 24-hour channel has a slimline programming budget of £15m a year – a third of the cost of the BBC News Channel – meaning it will have to be the kind of lean operation already familiar to Standard and Independent staff. From 2014, London Live can also bid for £5m a year in licence fee money from the BBC until 2017.

A former Sky News executive, Cook is alive to the challenge of working within such constraints. "Do we have a solid funding model? Absolutely. I don't in any terms feel the poor relation," she insists. "Do I feel cash-starved? No, I don't. Do I have the budgets I had at Sky? No, I don't."

It launches in uncertain territory: the UK has yet to produce a successfully sustained local TV channel, with Manchester's Guardian-owned Channel M perhaps the most promising endeavour before it gave in to market pressures last year. Even in London, Associated Newspapers' cable service Channel One had to close just as digital TV launched in 1998.

"London Live has by some distance the best opportunity of any UK local TV service to achieve any kind of scale success," says Douglas McCabe, a media expert at Enders Analysis. The channel has a unique weapon in its armoury in the form of the Evening Standard, which circulates 687,000 free copies around the capital each weekday and enjoys established links with dozens of high-end advertisers.

But its success will depend on how many tune in when the channel flickers into life next spring. It has a potential audience of 9 million, occupying the prime slot of channel 8 on Freeview and the not-so-prime slot of 117 on Sky. Channel bosses are privately lobbying Virgin Media to offer it a more eye-catching cable TV slot than the 159 it has allotted, with chief operating officer Tim Kirkman seeking one as attractive as "a shop between Selfridges and Harrods".

McCabe adds: "We could learn negative things for the rest of the country from the performance of London Live, but we are unlikely to learn too many things that will be genuinely helpful to other parts of the country where population density is much lower."

Josh Halliday