Quote:
Originally Posted by RichardCoulter
All being well, Now 90's hope to be back on Freeview at the end of September on a UK wide mux (their previous mux only covered 60% of the country).
Looks to me like their lease expired and they either didn't want to renew it as they are due to move to a better mux, or the owner of the mux didn't want to continue with the arrangement.
AFAIK, (not withstanding the temporary muxes), there are only a few hours overnight available on Freeview, so something else must be closing or moving to a temporary mux in order for Now 90's to have somewhere to move to.
Given that Now 90's performs better than Now 80's, you'd think that they would have temporarily closed Now 80's to keep Now 90's on air. Perhaps they didn't want to make any more changes than neccesary.
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I highly doubt it. Music channels operate on razor thin margins and are increasingly losing viewers to internet sources, usually Youtube. They can't afford a Main transmitter, especially when the price will likely be even higher than usual due to the temporary multiplexes shutting down in places already.
And there
is space on the
Main Freeview multiplexes. Sony moved True Movies and True Entertainment to the Local multiplex and moved Movies4Men to KeepItCountry's slot (the one that doesn't have Wales because of E4/S4C) when it couldn't afford to stay.
This left 3 Main transmitter slots open. So far only Together TV has taken one of them.
In related matters Sony closed True Crime and its +1 on the Manchester Mux to enable all these musical chairs by their other channels but kept its slot open. This started the clock on their channel numbers, their 12 weeks ends at the end of September. The Movies4Men and other True channels rebrand happens on the 10th so Sony could just sell the True brand after that and so indirectly sell their Freeview numbers (which can't otherwise happen due to Freeview rules, so the channel needs sold). So whoever is taking one of the two remaining Freeview Main transmitter slots could simultaneously buy the rump of the True business to get better channel numbers in the 2 weeks following the rebranding on the 10th.
All just a theory, but the Freeview status page says True Crime is not closed but is instead listed as Temporarily Off Air (see bottom of this page
https://www.freeview.co.uk/service-u...june-2019.html ) .