Virgin 1 becomes Channel One

Aww.. shame they got rid of Red, ah well I've noticed the menu style is pretty much the as Virgin 1 minus the Virgin branding.

I actually cried when I saw red had gone. I have absolutely no life.

I loved Red. Great mascot for the channel.

The new presentation is just dull. I wouldn't be surprised if the channel was shut down by the end of the year.

Let's face it - it's only been revamped to get the Virgin name off the air as quick as possible, probably whilst Sky work out what they want to do with the capacity in the long term.

Very true. I've noticed their website seems a lot more minimal than before too - quite why they didn't just replace the Virgin 1 logo I don't know.

I seem to remember reading that Sky don't takeover the advertising for Living TV Group until January, so if there are to be closures and/or Sky branding I'd expect it to happen then.

I wonder who owns this domain now... http://www.trouble.co.uk/

It still mentions Virgin 1 anyway.

Seems to belong to a company that went into liquidation in 1997.
The dates tie up with the launch of Challenge TV, which replaced the Family Channel.

My best guess would be the domain is owned by Sky, however it's registered to Telewest.

However it has Flextech in the name servers, until December 2010, and as we all know Flextech came about after Telewest got involved. Flextech was the original name of what became the Virgin Media channels that are now part of the Living TV group which is owned by Sky.

Unsurprisingly, following the effective completion of the deal between Virgin Media and Sky with the decision by the Office of Fair Trading to clear the deal, it has been announced that Virgin 1 aka Channel One is to be closed, along with Bravo, and the programming will be redeployed to Sky3 and other Sky channels.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/sep/15/bravo-channel-one-bdkyb

Challenge to replace on DTT.

Great News

Wow. I really thought it would be Challenge that was closed down after Sky sorted out what they were keeping and what they were killing. Could this mean that Challenge get the much needed budget increase they need to go back to being a decent channel? Could they go back to live continuity or even further back to in-vision continuity? I really hope so.

Pointless rebrand then