But the soap will be cheap to buy in and achieves the purpose of filling a channel that will be ditched the moment another broadcaster buys the channel and secures channel 23.
It definitely has the feel of a channel created for EPG switching purposes.
For the benefit of anyone who doesn't already understand how the move works. Imagine at the start you have...
No. 12: Channel a - owned by broadcaster x
No. 55: Channel b - owned by broadcaster y
Broadcaster x wants to sell their number 12 slot to y but can't due to rules. So x waits until a new slot becomes available (No. 42 in this example). They buy this slot and launch a new channel 'c'.
Then whilst following the rules they swap the positions of channels 'a' and 'c', resulting in...
No. 12: Channel c - owned by broadcaster x
No. 42: Channel a - owned by broadcaster x
No. 55: Channel b - owned by broadcaster y
With the first swap done channel 'c' is then sold off to broadcaster 'y'. This is then followed by broadcaster 'y' swapping the positions of their channels 'b' and 'c' to give.
No. 12: Channel b - owned by broadcaster y
No. 42: Channel a - owned by broadcaster x
No. 55: Channel c - owned by broadcaster y
With the EPG positions all switched channel 'c' has fulfilled its purpose. Chances are it'll be closed down and become a "channel 'a' +1" channel.
Similar past swaps have included the community channel, and more recently with the UKTV/Discovery split.
I think this is looking more likely to be going down the 'gradual transition' route, where the channel can be sold whole but the format of the channel can only change gradually.
In the case of The Big Deal, they went from having a 4 hour slot overnight to having an 18/24 hour stream (I have a feeling it was 12noon to 6am). The channel was renamed to MovieMix but was still categorised as Shopping/Participation, so most of the airtime was temporarily sold to Sit-up who used it to simulcast Speed Auction (the only time Speed Auction was on Freeview). Every night around Midnight a film would air, followed sometimes by a second one or some filler programming from Film24 (weirdly the only presentation was a 'The Big Deal' ident).
The channel could then change to showing films full time through the 'gradual change' rules, and was sold to Sony.
As I understand it b showing a massive chunk of Shopping programming Ideal World can claim that CCXTV is mostly shopping with some general entertainment, before in a few months changing to mostly/completely Entertainment. They can then sell CCXTV off to whichever company who can immediately use it either for a new entertainment channel, an existing entertainment channel not on Freeview or an existing Freeview customer can use it to cascade up the EPG, like you describe.
