If Sony actually want people to bother watching their channels they need to do more than give them a new name. The picture quality is sub-par SD. Why not get a FTA HD channel in there? Expand their range of movies when possible so their movie channel offerings aren't the same films being shown at different times every week. Less of the TV movie rubbish would help too.
This. When you’ve got Sky Cinema, Film4 and TCM (until recently) in HD, then surely a broadcaster such as Sony would be able to have at least one HD slot. It’s annoying as Sony Movie Channel shows some good films but the PQ is way below par.
The cost difference between running a low bit-rate SD service that can be received by all receivers on the local TV mux vs a decent bit-rate HD service on a DVB-T2 Com7 or Com8 mux, only available to those with Freeview HD receivers, will be very significant. If the channels are only just about breaking even or making small profits, those will be wiped out by the increased costs of broadcast on T2 muxes (which also have reduced coverage), and Freeview HD-only reception.
Sony Entertainment Television launched in 2011, was renamed Sony Channel in 2016 and then shut down last year. I don’t ever remember watching it, or seeing adverts for it, to be honest.
Sony can call their channels whatever they want, but have never watched any of their channels. I remember watching True Entertainment when CSC ran it when it showed constant repeats of Little House on the Prairie, but the majority of these cheap and cheerful Freeview channels don't appeal to me at all.
I've seen a bit of True Entertainment as it seems to be my mother in law's channel of choice in the afternoon. It seems to be just very odd, bland made for TV movies. The ones you see and wonder: why did this get made and who for?
Its the same sort of thing as The Hallmark Channel did... I think that's gone now isn't it?
I've seen a bit of True Entertainment as it seems to be my mother in law's channel of choice in the afternoon. It seems to be just very odd, bland made for TV movies. The ones you see and wonder: why did this get made and who for?
Its the same sort of thing as The Hallmark Channel did... I think that's gone now isn't it?
It was renamed Universal Channel, now Universal TV.
I always remember Hallmark because at one point they somehow ended up with the same channel number on the three major platforms (Sky, NTL, Telewest) so they could just advertise as being on ‘Channel 192’ (if I recall the number correctly)
I think other than the HD channels the furthest I get down the EPG on a semi-regular basis is Challenge. Very rarely scan through the rest and see something I think might be worth watching - only thing I can think of is Vikings on Blaze (which at least has a visually interesting identity) a couple of years back, which I stumbled across completely by accident, recorded the series they showed and never even thought about keeping an eye on them to see if they were showing later series.
I stumbled across the Smithonian Channel the other week, seems to have appeared without any fanfare. They had an original series about the Apollo missions on last weekend which was excellent, the rest of their schedule looks pretty good too