Time-shifted channels

We know that many television channels have a +1 or +2 time-shift, but in the Internet age, these don't seem very necessary with catch-up TV. Honestly, all the time-shifted channels not aimed at children should be shut down. How do these channels work, and what was the first time-shifted channel in the UK?

Now discuss...

They exist to increase audience share & additional exposure for advertisers.

A simple channel relay is an easy way of delivering this. Especially as majority of viewing remains linear.

At their simplest, +1 channels are just a video server on a 1 hour delay (with an additional bug-burner), but I believe they have to be licensed by Ofcom as channels in their own right, so the content can vary from the 'base' channel as required.

I heard once that the playout server for all of the UKTV channels fell over, and took a good 20 minutes to get back up and running again. This meant that all the +1 channels suffered the same outage an hour later - except Gold, where they fired up the spare playout chain, copied and pasted the playlist, offset it by an hour, and routed it to the +1 distribution chain.

Well initially on Freeview it was about acquiring spectrum to launch future channels, but most have survived in some form and they can add 50% to the ratings at effectively zero cost. I think ITV, C4 and C5 are looking to join the BBC in launching a "watch from start" service, but until they've got their on demand portfolios on all platforms, and accessible from the channel, I'd say +1 channels are here to stay.

The +24 channels didn't seem to get anywhere though thank god.

I think the first timeshift channel was Discovery+1 which was part of the original Sky Digital line up (20 years ago today in fact)

I'm sure I remember at one point a channel, possibly one of the Discoverys, had a +1.5

I remember a good few years ago once some kids network had a power failure and it knocked out the entire broadcast including its +1. The timeshift channel was the first to come back but the main channel took half an hour or so to recover; and of course the entire on-air saga played out again when it came round on +1.

This can be an interesting use of +1 channels for capturing break downs and what not, if they get captured that is. Some breakdowns knock the stuffing out of the entire lot to the point where the +1 repeat doesn't happen and it then becomes interesting to see what happens when there's nothing to broadcast, but generally most main channel breakdowns presentation wise go out exactly as they did an hour earlier.

Of course broadcasters have the ability to edit the +1 output if somebody drops an f-bomb or whatever but as above, they're just audience share boosters. The first mainstream +1 channel was Channel4+1, though there were a handful of others on the Sky platform of various lengths before they all converted to +1.

Are there any +2 channels still around these days? The last one I recall was DMAX +2.

They're handy for solving recording clashes.

But of course the advent of catch-up and On-Demand also solves recording clashes by not having to record at all where said programme is available on demand.

Yes. If I forget to record something an hour before

On Demand's still a bit of a faff compared to playing a recording - particularly if it comes with unskippable ads.

I agree, it's often easier to do that: Watching online commonly means having to endure screeds of ads and temperamental buffering.