New Sky channels: Crime, Comedy, Documentaries, Nature

With the new channels, I think it's highly unlikely that at least one channel won't close as a result.

Sky Two has been living on borrowed time for years, so wouldn't be surprised if it closes.

There were plans to make Sky Arts free to air and put it on Freeview, which could result in Pick closing to free up the EPG slot. The number of programmes Pick has on Sky catch-up has been going down for a while, and there is now nothing on there at all, which could be a sign that something might be happening.

I think E! is less likely to close, but you never know.

So Sky Documentaries got delayed because the idents weren't ready then?

Possibly not because of the idents... I guess it may be more to do with how they were going to position the identity of the channel? May also explain why it was removed from SkyMedia's opportunity page whereas History and Nature are still up.

Quite curious to see what the idents for sky documentaries will be

Assuming that the channels are also reordered on NOW TV (they currently follow the Sky EPG)...

Sky One
Sky Witness
Sky Atlantic
GOLD
Comedy Central
Sky Comedy
Sky Documentaries
Sky Crime
Sky Arts
Sky History
FOX
Discovery
MTV
National Geographic
Sky Nature
SYFY

It doesn't seem fair that SYFY has been relegated in this way, it's sure to kill off the channel before long.

That's the spin. But of course the whole of Sky's marketing and operations mechanism has been disrupted - as have most businesses of course.

All of the promos (web, magazines, outdoor) that would have accompanied the factual launch encouraging new customers to sign up to Sky were postponed after Sky stopped new installations.

And of course, the ad market has fallen off a cliff, so from an ad sales point of view, this delay allows Sky to look at how it makes the channel attractive to whichever advertisers are still out there and planning ad campaigns for late May and June.

Incidentally, the programmes themselves being advertised for Sky Documentaries are the same as those billed in earlier press releases - so it's not the content, just the packaging that's being tweaked.

As weird as it seems, I can't see Sky Two going. This is because you can't number your channels if there aren't a multiple amount of them. Numbering BBC channels like BBC One makes sense because there is BBC Two, Three and Four.

Pick could merge with Sky Two and Sky Arts can take Pick's spot on Freeview?

There was a Sky One with no Sky Two for the guts of 11 years during the 90s/early 2000s.

Sky One was around quite a LONG time without a Sky Two.

Sky Two existed briefly on Sky analogue multichannels and then re-appeared around 6 or 7 years after Sky Digital launched
So for long periods there was a Sky One without a Sky Two?

Ok, as I am a lot younger than most people on here, I didn't know that.

I think the Sky One brand exists outside of a numbering scheme to be honest. Sky Two doesn't have the same brand recognition.

When Pick was known as Sky Three, then it made sense to have Sky One and Sky Two. But when Atlantic launched and Sky acquired Living then Two and Three became low priority. But this was in 2011 and amazingly both channels are still on air.

Sky One didn’t have a Sky Two from 1989 to 1996 and then again from 1997 to 2005. They had a supplementary channel called Sky One Mix, that became Sky Mix before it eventually became Sky Two.

Sky Two of 1996-97 was not the Sky Two we have today. It was basically a channel with its own output outright. However most of what was shown didn’t rate well causing Sky to pull the plug in less than a year. The frequency was replaced with the National Geographic Channel.