Paramount Channel to launch in the UK

The branding being used in the international Paramount Channel's have the Mountain in the logo.

From a viewer perspective, of course some people want more quality but don't want to pay for it. However, the TV industry is a business.

Channel 5, 5STAR, 5USA and Spike are not premium brands, and their content isn't either. They do a great job providing wide appeal entertainment to a Freeview/Freesat audience. Some of their content is second run programmes that have previously been on Pay TV, along with mostly reality and factual programmes. Perfect.

Paramount is a premium brand, with the new US network developing a string of premium drama and comedy. To allow that to go on Freeview/Freesat is wrong. People will pay for it (Netflix FOX Universal Sky Atlantic etc) so why give it away to the masses for free.

So why bother creating this channel if the stuff it plans to make for it may never appear. Trutv said there planned for orignal content but that never happened. If the channel is just full of Crap then it may never get the viewers back in the door.

As per my other post, from the perspective of some viewers with Freeview/Freesat I get it. Not from a business perspective, they have missed an opportunity to bolster their Pay TV network in the UK with a new channel. The answer is to invest in both markets, with free channels like Spike and pay channels like Comedy Central.

As for the Sony Channel, the problem is mainly due to a lack of enough quality content. They have a very well known premium brand, and the channel is on Sky, Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk. However, they have failed to invest in enough quality content to be able to rival the likes of Universal, Fox, W, Alibi, Syfy, Comedy Central, MTV etc. They also have poor EPG slots which doesn't help.

Sony Movie Channel is rating better than when it was only on Sky, but that's because it is now available to so many more people via Freeview, Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk. It would have been better to keep Movie Mix as their basic free movie channel and add it to Freesat as well as Freeview, and make Sony Movie Channel a premium movie channel and add it to Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk as well as Sky. A premium HD channel would be far more befitting of the Sony brand.

Sony has never been premium in this country. They built up their brand buying Dolphin Television which has the low budget Movies4Men as one of their portfolio and CSC Media Group with again more FTA fare with POP and the TRUE channels.

Even their electronics products are hardly premium. It's not Alba/Bush by any means, but they compete with those brands with most people can afford, such as Panasonic.

As for Viacom, I believe they know what they're doing. They've seen the success of investing in Channel 5 and their spin-off channels, adding Spike to C5's portfolio and including Paramount to it will only make the overall C5 brand more viable to advertisers.

They already have channels such as Comedy Central and MTV which are better suited to the paywall model.

You're talking about the channel's content not being premium, correct, but the Sony brand has a far higher value than Freeview/Freesat channels like Quest, Blaze, Spike, Dave, True, TruTV, YourTV etc.

There is a reason that brands like Sky, Fox, Universal and Discovery etc are not on Freeview, except for Sky News.

Sky came up with Pick, Fox came up with YourTV, Discovery came up with Quest, A+E came up with Blaze etc, all to keep their brands off Freeview/Freesat.

I'd argue Sony's reputation is still strong in this country as an electronics manufacturer, but their problem is other companies like LG have started making much better things for much less.

As for broadcasting, I wouldn't be surprised if anybody I knew didn't even know Sony had a TV channel.

True, but the Xperia mobile phone range for example (and I'm a handset owner) isn't as good as Motorola for example who pack a lot more in their Moto G range than the Sony budget range while Samsung and Apple rule the roost in the mobile market. Ironically, LG's cheapest pay monthly phone isn't on a par with the Xperia E5.

Sony's tv channels are cheap and cheerful with the electronics on the next level, but not a premium brand by any means.

Sony has owned Columbia and Tristar for nearly 30 years, so they have got a long association with the film industry.

I wouldn't say that Columbia and Tristar are "cheap and cheeful", so those brands should add something to their movie channel.

Big difference in acquiring established Hollywood film studios and distributors over crap channels in the UK.

In any case, film isn't the money maker it used to be either. There's more money in gaming than in an average blockbuster.

That recording's got tone, but I remember seeing it circa 1997 with the sound of car horns instead.

I don't know where you get that idea from. The only reason Sony has a mobile range at all is because it allows them to test out their premium conponents that make it to the next generation of iPhones and other premium smartphones. They made some of the first phones with 4K cameras and 4K screens.

Sony haven't done a Panasonic with badge engineering Vestel TVs, for example, and they don't extend their gamut down to budget models as LG and Samsung do.