The rebrand will happen on May 5th at the very very earliest as 4Music Sundays are being trialled until May 4th. In other words May 4th is the final 4Music Sunday and they will have to complete the deal before rebranding.
I wonder if it will be a complete overhaul or whether it will just be simply renamed with additional programming in the evening?
The thread about Virgin channels going widescreen got me thinking... I hope that if/when The Hits becomes 4Music, it also goes widescreen.
Most/all of the "4Music Sundays" stuff was 16:9 (or 14:9-ed?) programmes shown in The Hits' usual 4:3 frame. So there were black horizontal bars, upon which the DOG largely sat. It looked awful on my widescreen TV. (I have it set to show 4:3 broadcasts with vertical black bars at the side, rather than any kind of stretchyvision etc, cuz that's my preference)
4Music was definately in 14:9 mode, I've got a Sony WS TV with DTT built in and I have it set to Auto, so it's usually 16:9 or 4:3 standard, but whenever I put on The Hits it went into 14:9 automatically and it just looked really poor cropped.
I guess it depends whether the current playout system for the Bauer music channels is capable of 16:9, if The Hits/4 Music got moved to Horseferry Rd, then I guess 16:9 would be likely.
4Music was definately in 14:9 mode, I've got a Sony WS TV with DTT built in and I have it set to Auto, so it's usually 16:9 or 4:3 standard, but whenever I put on The Hits it went into 14:9 automatically and it just looked really poor cropped.
I guess it depends whether the current playout system for the Bauer music channels is capable of 16:9, if The Hits/4 Music got moved to Horseferry Rd, then I guess 16:9 would be likely.
I don't think the full rebrand is expected till the Autumn. IIRC The Hits have some contract with Sky which C4 want to wait until it ends before rebranding it.