Sky News on five

Many comments have been made over the last couple of days about Five News not providing breaking news coverage of the Russian hostage siege, or other major events.

As has been quite rightly pointed out, any major breaking story is usually covered by two other channels at the same time, although C5 did used to carry breaking news specials in their early days - although I suppose that was to add credibility to their 5 News services.

However, in January Sky News will be making the bulletins for C5, so will we see a change in policy which will see Sky News (or special programmes from the 5 News team) on air for events such as yesterday?

Five already has an arrangement with Sky to broadcast Sky News in the event of major breaking news.

Isn't that an agreement for Overnight broadcasts though? Or has it changed?

When they replaced the 6am-6.30am ITN News Channel simulcast with half an hour of Sky News's Sunrise, the deal also included the ability for Five to opt into Sky News in the event of major breaking news.

AFAIK this ability has never been used - I expect it would only happen in the event of an event on the scale of September 11.

EDIT - found this from Digital Spy: www.digitalspy.co.uk/article/ds4458.html

Ah, thanks for clearing that up!