Community Channel rebranding as ‘Together’

Digital oddity The Community Channel which has been around for as long as I can remember (digitally speaking) will be relaunching as Together on the 16th and will be on Freeview channel 93. I expect the schedule will largely stay the same. I get the purpose of the channel but looking at the schedules I don’t really understand why anyone would watch it and how exactly it’s managed to survive as long as it has.

The image in this article reminds me of the C4 endboards.

http://www.a516digital.com/2018/01/together-tv-prepares-for-freeview-launch.html

Since 2000, apparently - very long history on its wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Channel_(UK)



'Together', eh? Maybe the marketers are convinced that word sums up their mission better than 'Community Channel', and maybe it'll catch on, but I'm still not sure adverbs work as channel names. "You're watching Together... by yourself".

I'm sure someone could mash up the channel names of Together, Really and Yesterday into a "Who's On First"-style comedy sketch...

(If they were truly down with the kids, they'd have called it TH CMMNTY CHNNL)

Together... Because Oneness was such a success.

Think there's already a thread for that.

Togetherness.

Is it about a bunch of south coast oap living in sheltered housing?

Yeah OK.

Has the Community Channel name had a lot of problems getting established? Google search results often place it below the actress Natalie Tran's Youtube channel "communitychannel" - while the UK channel's Facebook videos have views in the hundreds, and its Youtube channel doesn't seem to exist.

It was crowdfunding to save itself recently - mostly due to 5 donors, who gave £50,000 each in return for putting a season of shows on air:

- https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/community-channel/

This is some of the old pres from 2012 and 2017:

- https://presentationarchive.com/uk/community-channel/community-channel-2009/

The new promo is indeed very Channel 4-ish

- https://www.facebook.com/CommunityChannelTV/videos/10160091730460227/

Reminds me a lot of Channel 4's blocks.

Apparently the BBC One identity has to be mentioned in *every single* thread.

That's very gentle to think it was made in the 1980s...

Not wanting to go on about the channel's problems in gaining recognition, but if you search for Together Community Channel, this thread is the first or second result. They have some very worthy programming, and I suppose they decided to put shows onto non-Youtube sites on principle. But isn't there more they could do to bring in some viewers? Maybe cross-promotion with similar PSBs?

Didn't Sky put quite a bit of money into it a couple of years ago?

For what it is it's content isn't too bad during the day at least - at night they have been known to go down the adult programming route to I guess try and grab a bit of attention. I've always felt it should be the sustaining feed for local channels - it's content would fit there much better than films from Talking Pictures or simulcasts of Tru TV. Might be better for them than constantly begging and losing mux space too to have a window on the local channels, but realistically not sure it would generate much revenue for either the local channels or "Together".

I suspect the most funding they've got over the last couple of years was from A&E networks by letting them buy the channel in order to take their Freeview EPG slot (as they weren't just allowed to sell the slot) - this is probably the final stage of that process allowing them back on the EPG, 30 places lower than they were - though I do think being positioned in the 90s just before the HD channels is a far better place than in the 60s or 70s.