(ITV) Merit

The channel has now launched. And because of this, ITV3+1 (on Freeview) is now from midnight to 6am.

Do we even have any listings yet? Has the channel even got an online presence?

Now a year has passed since UKTV sold Really, Good Food and Home to Discovery could UKTV have plans to launch a new channel for all their lifestyle shows (the archive BBC cookery/gardening/home programmes) and have done a deal with ITV to acquire channel 34 from them for this.

Wasn't a lot of the BBC lifestyle content tied up in the deal between Discovery? I could be wrong on that one. Does seem strange that they are not even using the itv brand. I can't even think of logical links to the word merit and lifestyle content.

They should've named it ITV Lifestyle.

But as speculated earlier this channel probably is here to eventually be sold to someone higher up the EPG so they can eventually do a simple channel swap to this better EPG number at a later date, so they wouldn't want to give it a name that would need to be changed when it's sold.

I’m kind of fascinated that a new channel from a big PSB is launching and we don’t have any detail of what it will actually look like on screen. That must be the first time that’s happened in years. Even in the pre-YouTube/Vimeo days you still had press packs with pictures of new idents.

I almost thought "Merit" was just some name some mocker made up and now apparently it's a real thing?

Yeah, it's real. ITV applied for a license in May.

IT's there and just showing a "Coming Soon" message for the next 7 days on the EPG.

But the website now has this down:



So I've got no idea.

Shame it (seemingly) ain’t launching today as I’m curious to see (if anything) the presentation, hoping to hear more on this soon 👀