Shortlived TV channels

[johnnyboy]

Who could ever forget Vibe TV with Angelle's "Love and Pain"?

[Neil Jones]

As TV Live Forum is closing, can anyone think of the channels that just over the year or less. One example would be Whereits.at.

ITV Play. Launched 19 April 2006, Closed 13 March 2007.

The ITV Play strand itself hung around on ITV until the end of the year.

[Kojak]

Who could ever forget Vibe TV with Angelle's "Love and Pain"?

I had... until you just reminded me of it. Thanks, johnnyboy. I owe you one(!).  The channel was paid for by her then-boyfriend (and now husband), a rich businessman named Steve Bennett. Turns out he was due to launch a shopping channel, but had paid for the Sky slot a bit earlier, so used the lead time to show his girlfriend's music video non-stop. I've only just found out, in fact, that the couple went on to found Gems TV and Jewellery Maker:

https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/n...on-8550291

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Culture%3...a088387926

[Aplus1]

Is it true that it used the “Interactive” card slot on Sky Boxes of the era for a loyalty scheme?

IIRC the idea was ever fully realised. It was a gift for Multiroom subscribers who could just leave their extra box tuned in to Nuts TV all day long. No idea if the rewards would've been actually worth the effort though.

In fact, wasn't it going to be the one and only use of that infamous slot before that finally got rid of it with Sky Q?

Earlier than that - the later generation of Sky+HD boxes dropped the interactive slot long before Sky Q came to town.

I know Turner did talk about possibly using the slot for some kind of loyalty scheme type thing but I don't think that ever came to anything - as far as I know the slot was never officially opened to third party broadcasters. It was used once by Sky themselves, as they briefly offered a credit card ("Sky Card", backed by Barclaycard) which, upon receipt, needed to be activated by placing it in that slot and letting the box make a dial up call. Pretty sure that was the one and only use of the slot in the real world, though.

[telebox2001]

That's the first I've heard about it. Ah, the interactive card. Wonder what was the initial idea?

[JK1985]

The Paranormal Channel, launched by Most Haunted creators Yvette Fielding and Karl Beattie on June 9th 2008.

It was filled with imported paranormal programming, including repeat runs of ITV Strange But True series and Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World.

The channel also had home produced shows from Antix Productions (Yvette and Karl's production company) with spin offs from Most Haunted.

The used to have round table discussion shows, which looked like it was filmed at a back office of Antix Productions, it made GB News looked professional.

The channel failed to gain an audience. Even though by 2008 Most Haunted and Most Haunted Live were pulling in millions of viewers on Living TV, their own channel scraped a few thousand. They needed the backing of a channel like Living TV to survive.

In August 2009 it was rebranded as The Unexplained Channel, but this was the kiss of death for it, as the channel gradually cut back its hours, from being 24 hours a day to around just 5 hours per day.

The channel finally ended by the end of 2009, with the channel number slot on Sky handed to Information TV.

[JAS84]

Granada Talk TV is another one, it lasted less than a year but it launched the careers of both Natasha Kaplinsky and Sacha Baron Cohen

Yeah, 11 months, 1 October 1996 to 31 August 1997. Though the final day happened to be the day Diana died, so they just simulcast Sky News instead of airing the final day's planned schedule.

The original version of Sky 2. Lasted exactly a year, 1 September 1996 to 31 August 1997, then was replaced in Fox Kids Network's downtime by the National Geographic Channel.

Channel One, the rebrand of Virgin 1 after Sky bought the Flextech channels. 3 September 2010 to 1 February 2011, only lasted five months.

Carlton World and Carlton Kids, ONdigital exclusive channels, ran from 15 November 1998 to 1 February 2000, so that's only 14 and a half months.

[Neil Jones]

-https://web.archive.org/web/20090619214137/http://www.chyp.com/PubWebFiles/presscoverage/sky_press_release.pdf might be of interest re: Sky interactive slots.


Also this web page at Digital Spy: -https://www.digitalspy.com/tech/satellite/a130565/loyalty-card-to-use-second-sky-slot/ suggests NutsTV of all things had an interest in the slot, although it was moot anyway because the channel closed six months later The magazine the channel was based on lived on until 2014 after it lost most of its subscribers.

[Inspector Sands]

There was The Money Channel in the 90's that came from a new studio setup Wapping way - didn't last long...  A bit like the Simply... family of channels. Simply Money, Simply Shopping etc. 

Which was backed by, of all people, 60s pop star Adam Faith! (Who, later in life, had a second career as a financial journalist and adviser, so it's not as bizarre as it sounds that he backed such a channel.)

And Adam Faith's last words before he died were famously

"Channel 5 is all shit, isn't it? Christ, the crap they put on there. It's a waste of space"

[James2001]

And god is clearly a fan of channel 5, to smite him down for such blasphemy.

[Spencer]

As TV Live Forum is closing, can anyone think of the channels that just over the year or less. One example would be Whereits.at.

Their slogan was ‘Life’s too short for crap TV’, and they sort of went on to prove it.

Another short lived channel from the early days of digital was Wellbeing, a tie-up between Boots and Granada, and all broadcast from Yorkshire TV studios in Leeds. Calendar’s Christine Talbot was one of the main presenters. There were obviously high hopes for it. I remember Boots used the URL wellbeing.com at the time, but it didn’t last long.

[James2001]

Whereits.at was bizarre as hell, and I seem to remember they got in trouble for stuff they were putting out pre-watershed as well.

[eggsontoast]

BSB 5 Channel TV, they don’t last long before Sky merger, especially Galaxy and Now Channel, both are closed after the merger and channel was replaced by Sky One and Sky News/Arts respectively.

The only BSB channel that remains on-air is now known as Sky Sports!

[Kojak]

I remember Boots used the URL wellbeing.com at the time, but it didn’t last long.

I remember that! I don't remember the Wellbeing channel (don't think it was ever on cable, was it?) but I definitely do remember the wellbeing.com URL. A quick Wayback Machine search suggests it remained in use until April 2003, at which point it began to redirect to boots.com.

[James2001]

BSB 5 Channel TV, they don’t last long before Sky merger, especially Galaxy and Now Channel, both are closed after the merger and channel was replaced by Sky One and Sky News/Arts respectively.

The only BSB channel that remains on-air is now known as Sky Sports!

Isn't one of the Sky Cinema channels basically a descendent of BSB's Movie Channel too? Though there's been so much rebranding and rearranging of those channels over the years it's probably hard to keep track of which one it is now.