"Movie Mix"

So, something weird's going on with Freeview. Channel 32 previously held Big Deal, which was used briefly for the extremely short-lived TView movies service (which used the flawed Xtraview "Encryption" System). It has apparently been completely dormant for a long while up to now.

A 24 hour stream has now been obtained, and now the channel has been relabelled as "Movie Mix". At present, this is an almost complete misnomer, as the channel is actually a straightforward simulcast of Speed Auction, which spends most of the day broadcasting "bid plus" infomercials. A single movie goes out each morning at 3am, this morning it's "From Hell to Bourneo".

Judging by the extremely poor transfer the film is originating from, the obscurity of the film and the graveyard slot, it appears they are not particularly committed to Movies. So is this some kind of license fiddle?

I was watching too, and I noticed that this vintage advert was played before the film for some reason:

Tomorrow the film is The Hoax (2006), starring Richard Gere. It's a film that received relatively positive reviews, but had a limited release in the US & Canada - meaning the film was low grossing and not well known.

It appears that the slot for a film is 2 hours, and any gap is filled by "ShortCutters", which apparently features "Short films from all over the UK."

Why show an advert which has to be at least 40 years old for a product which no longer exists?

Straight out of the film, this advert was shown: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0-ceoMc3xI

It appears they're added for effect, and sourced from YouTube (the compression was evident on screen).

Out of that, we saw a few seconds of a "The Big Deal" slide with music in to ShortCutters.

EDIT: ShortCutters is actually around 10 minutes long. At the end of it, "The Big Deal" slide reappeared, straight back in to the same episode of ShortCutters again. Very odd. The episode featured the short film "Yoga Noga Reyoga" and footage from the premier of Mr. Bean's Holiday. The programme originates from Sumo TV.

EDIT 2: the third episode shown is actually a different episode.

EDIT 3: another brief "The Big Deal" slide in to a JCM infomercial at 0457. It is not directly simulcasting Speed Auction though, which is showing a different JCM infomercial.

ShortCutters used to be a timefiller on Smile TV before it went all Babestationy.

That ShortCutters last night appeared to be from 2007 - I presume it was the shortest filler they had, that could fill up a wide range of spaces.

Sourced from Youtube? If they can't even get broadcast masters, do they even have the right to show them? I would've thought it's a breach of copyright - and indeed, so is their usage on Youtube, unless the uploader is the company who own the product in question.

It's entirely possible they've used YouTube as the source, but contacted the copyright holder. Either that, or they've decided it's unlikely that anyone would complain.

The film that is listed in the EPG is for the 2006 film The Hoax, but the one being shown is the 1972 film The Hoax, starring Frank Bonner and Bill Ewing. There were no vintage adverts before the start, it just went straight to the film from the The Big Deal ident.

The 'Movie Mix' channel now has proper branding and a new logo, with Sony providing the movies. Matilda is on now for fans of it, and it is on tommorow at 10am.

As it has done since January 17th... http://tv-live.org.uk/wp/index.php/other/entertainment/movie-mix-2013/