Rebranded Channels

[Neil Jones]

Didn't they have a dirty feed as well so had large opaque DOGs obscurring the ITV2 DOG?

S2 definitely did:
https://625.uk.com/dogwatch/index.htm#s2

[thegeek]

Virgin1 to Channel One is a noteable one from the early years of Freeview when Sky bought Virgin's small bouquet of channel,

Virgin 1 was itself a rebrand of Ftn - a knock-on from the ntl:Telewest merger and rebranding to Virgin Media.

[JAS84]

Which was odd, as FTN's name wasn't a reference to NTL or Telewest, the name stood for Flextech Television Network.

[JasonB]

Could we count BSB?

Merged with Sky in 1990 and most of the BSB channels were replaced with Sky equivalents - the only two that survived in from BSB's launch was Movies and Sports - Galaxy became what is now Sky One (IIRC it had a different name in 1990), Now became Sky News and at least one of them vanished altogether.

Yes, Sky One was originally Sky Channel. It had already rebranded to Sky One by the time of the merger though.

A couple of other examples. Fox Kids became Jetix, after being bought by Disney. It later rebranded again to Disney XD. The channel now called Pop Max was originally Kix, renamed to match the other CSC kids channels after they were bought by Sony.

Wasn’t Sky Channel “Satellite Television Europe”?

[thegeek]

Which was odd, as FTN's name wasn't a reference to NTL or Telewest, the name stood for Flextech Television Network.

Flextech was owned by Telewest pre ntl merger. (Bizarrely, according to Wikipedia it started life as an oil services company!)

[nwtv2003]

Could we count BSB?

Merged with Sky in 1990 and most of the BSB channels were replaced with Sky equivalents - the only two that survived in from BSB's launch was Movies and Sports - Galaxy became what is now Sky One (IIRC it had a different name in 1990), Now became Sky News and at least one of them vanished altogether.

Yes, Sky One was originally Sky Channel. It had already rebranded to Sky One by the time of the merger though.

A couple of other examples. Fox Kids became Jetix, after being bought by Disney. It later rebranded again to Disney XD. The channel now called Pop Max was originally Kix, renamed to match the other CSC kids channels after they were bought by Sony.

Wasn’t Sky Channel “Satellite Television Europe”?

It was indeed, that was prior to the time Rupert Murdoch took ownership of the venture. I’d certainly recommend the Satellite Wars documentary, it tells the story of Satellite Television Europe quite well.

https://youtu.be/kS9qvlcymRI

[JasonB]

If I recall years ago there was a full version of the Satellite Television Launch on YouTube which was about 10 minutes. That’s the only footage i’ve ever seen of the station.

[Mateus Honrado]

Fiver was a crap name - just seemed as though they were trying to jump on the Dave 'witty channel names' bandwagon at the time.

Couldn't agree with you more. Five Life suited better for the channel than Fiver.

[bkman1990]

The one I remember was Kix being rebranded to Pop Max which was done to align it's brand with Tiny Pop & Pop. Kix was the main channel to show either live action/animated kids action shows that were mostly marketed to young boys or teenagers. But it has stuff like Power Rangers & Angry Birds included in it's line-up which are marketed to both boys & girls. All 3 channels now at the present time provide the Pop Player as their main online catch up service for their acquired Kids TV content.

[WillPS]

Virgin1 to Channel One is a noteable one from the early years of Freeview when Sky bought Virgin's small bouquet of channel,

Virgin 1 was itself a rebrand of Ftn - a knock-on from the ntl:Telewest merger and rebranding to Virgin Media.

That was less a consequence of the rebrand and more a consequence of the Sky carriage fallout which had occurred that year, they made a big song and dance about how it was available on all platforms, and for a short time bid on some fairly high profile import programming. Virgin Central was another play around the same time.

Not long after it launched some new brooms arrived, quickly resolved the dispute with Sky and such endeavours were deprioritised, eventually leaving to the sale of Flextech/VMTV/Living TV Group.

[nwtv2003]

Setanta Sports News was also born out of the VM/Sky dispute. Virgin Media owned 50% of the venture whilst ITN ran the day to day operation of the channel. Unsurprisingly no effort was made to keep the channel when Setanta UK went into administration.

As said though the dispute only lasted about 18 months before the non premium Sky channels went back on Virgin Media.

[EeveeSparkles]

The one I remember was Kix being rebranded to Pop Max which was done to align it's brand with Tiny Pop & Pop. Kix was the main channel to show either live action/animated kids action shows that were mostly marketed to young boys or teenagers. But it has stuff like Power Rangers & Angry Birds included in it's line-up which are marketed to both boys & girls. All 3 channels now at the present time provide the Pop Player as their main online catch up service for their acquired Kids TV content.

I only ever watch Pop Max for Pokemon, which is also targeted towards males and females.

[JAS84]

Is Pop Max really a male oriented channel nowadays? It used to be the male counterpart to Pop Girl, but that channel no longer exists - Pop Max is essentially just Pop 2, isn't it?

[Brekkie]

The schedule doesn't look too different to Pop.

[IdentFan101]

Pop was originally Toons & Tunes from October 2002 to 2003 while Tiny Pop was Pop Plus from September 2003 to July 2004.