Are niche teen block and channels a dying breed?

Over the last decade a lot of niche teen block and channels have bite the dust BBC Switch, Trouble and T4. They were out of touch of today digital media world.

I know teens are well catered by mainstream youth linear channels like E4, ITV2 (not withstanding BBC Three TV thanks to DQF) and others but had Virgin Media cared about Trouble and never actually shut it down it would've been still with us today after the Sky takeover, renamed as Sky Trouble and become a bigger budget youth channel.

I think it may be a tad unfair to say that those blocks were "out of touch with today's digital media world". T4 aired 1998-2012, so they responded with what was in at the time. To suggest otherwise implies its their fault for not having a time machine, TARDIS or a Delorean at hand.

Trouble closed long before Sky came along. Whether it would have survived under Sky is up for debate, considering Sky closed Bravo as well not long after buying the operation.

Trouble in itself, once moving to the entertainment section, began to fizzle out completely, and its identity was also affected as a result. It targeted itself towards teenagers but did a better job of communicating it when it was on the kids section of the Sky EPG.

Considering that Sky killed off Bravo and then regretted it soon after, even as far as asking for Sky2 replacements in the Loungelab surveys, I'd say Trouble would have had a hard time trying to have its existence justified by Sky, though it also benefit Sky in the teen market.

Sunday Brunch ultimately killed off T4 rather than digital media, and I refuse to believe unoriginal features like Taxi to Training are an adequate replacement for BBC3 on TV, a channel killed off by the Tories rather than Twitter. BBC Switch and the teen strands that came before it were more a victim of BBC politics than anything.

Considering ITV justified ITVBe by having too much demand for ad space on ITV2 I'd be surprised if E4 isn't in a similar position, in which case a T4 revival as a channel in its own right would probably now complement rather than compete with E4. The trouble is though the sort of US teen comedies and dramas they used to pad out the T4 strand with, and prior to that The Bigger Breakfast, are not really produced in the volumes they once were. The Saturday morning strands they came from in the US still exist but now often filled with reality shows passed off as educational content.

A legacy of the T4 strand which still exists to this day is those US series, which are still regularly shown in the old T4 slots on Channel 4.

Wasn't the theory behind Trouble's demise that its source of American shows dried up after the merger of the WB and UPN?

They are declining as a result of a combination of several factors.

IMO they relied heavily on American programming, therefore putting themselves at the mercy of the US TV industry.