RTL take full control of Five

I just hope by "Reband" you meen "Rescheduling" too, you know, to fit with what RTL has in thier libary.

I can just imagine Five using "dual branding" idents for the phasing in/out period, like ITV(1)'s spinning blue hearts era.

Starting off with, say:

five
from RTL

and gradually progressing through stages over the cousre of a year or three, until the "five" disappears, and we end up with, say, "RTL UK" or whatever.

It's odd to think that RTL will rename five , a quick glance at their corporate website reveals that 19 out of their 31 channels do not mention the RTL name at all.

For example: Yorin, Fun TV, M6, TF6, W9, Antena 3. So five fits in quite nicely as it is!

Click here for full details

Shame it's very unlikely they won't be using these idents (scroll to bottom). I quite like them.

"The complete holding of this TV station enables RTL Group to develop a more efficient strategy in the UK. It will become possible to drop FIVE as a name and replace it by the RTL brand."

Read into the above quote what you like.

The (5) in a circle is not dissimilar to five's old branding.

I agree with Neil that the logo is very channel 5 from 1997, but I must say they are quite clever. They may look cheap, but they do work well, and just look how many there are. It's a simple idea that was used well. It's a shame we can't have that sort of good branding sense in this country. At least those idents had a bit of fun, though perhaps their programming did.

But saying that we do have the BBC 2, the incredible 4 idents (which are better than the RTL5 ones, but were most probably a lot more expensive), even the ITV Day and ITV2 idents are quite well thought out.

Very true - indeed it shows that RTL are good at building successful brands, rather than launching corporate re-branding exercises.

The TV stations that have RTL branding have been around in the group for a long time, and grew out of Luxemburg transmitted French and German language broadcasts being received and propagated by analogue cable systems in Germany and Belgium. They had quite powerful transmitters within the territory of Luxemburg which also gave good reception to Lorraine including big cities like Metz and Nancy.

The others were either acquired, in which case the existing brand was retained (eg M6) or a specific brand was developed for the usually segmented market.

From the list of activates that RTL has in France and the Netherlands it would appear that the strategy in the UK would be to grow the existing five operation, and to expand laterally into thematic channels, particularly music. This makes the main target EMAP, and potential partnerships with BSkyB and GCap. There's even the potential for merger/takeover with the non-UKTV part of Flextech, and even GCap or EMAP.

If RTL take Flextech's part in UKTV, hopefully that would mean we could get some decent programmes on UKTV Gold for once. FremantleMedia own the Thames TV archive. They go back to showing quality archive programming like they used to, instead of dinnerladies, Gimme Gimme Gimme and Johnathan Creek over and over and over!