New Sky channels: Crime, Comedy, Documentaries, Nature

Sky Atlantic and Sky Witness too.

I expect to see all of the accounts merged in the coming days.

This could end up doing more harm than good, as people searching for the individual pages won't be able to find them, and people won't be able to tag them in posts.

The Sky One page has been completed changed. It is now just Sky TV, with no reference to Sky One at all, and looks like it was changed in January.

The pages for the other channels (Sky Arts, Atlantic and Witness) have maintained some of their identity, in terms of the website addresses and photos.

Sky Comedy doesn't even appear to have a Facebook page. Maybe the plan is indeed to the phase out the individual channel pages and merge them into one. Most of them haven't posted anything since January, and Sky Witness hasn't posted anything since June last year.

Seems like SyFy's Twitter and Facebook page hasn't been active since January as well, possible rebrand to a Sky-branded channel.

E! hasn't posted anything since 24th of January on Twitter either...I can see becoming Sky branded aswell.

I really can't see the point of the 'Sky History' branding. If they're keeping the 'H' and 'H2' logos and wordmarks, then many viewers of these niche channels will hardly recognise the change.

It's rather like the vanity project of UK Gold becoming UKTV Gold, G.O.L.D and then just Gold; or even ITV to ITV1 and back again. Only us pres geeks will notice.

Sky E!?

Not sure E! would end up being Sky branded since they are fairly reliant on content from the US channel with the same name.

As has been mentioned previously, this is likely to be a transitionary logo, so viewers will know it's the same channel, and the History logo will probably eventually disappear at which point the channel will adopt standard Sky branding.

I agree that the branding of E! seems fairly safe in the short term - international variations of the channel do not appear to have any other naming conventions and I can’t see Sky/NBCU changing it just in the U.K. when they do still use a lot of E! USA’s content.

I would have said the same about SYFY but with the change to History’s name I’m no longer so sure... there does appear to be some variations of the name such as ‘Universal Sci-Fi’ and ‘SYFY Universal’ in other territories so changing it to something like ‘Sky SYFY’ does not seem entirely impossible... that they are still adding new content to the channel suggests it’s not going anywhere for now but I would still expect that both E! and SYFY, name change or not will align closer to Sky in terms of presentation and content over the next few months.

In my opinion, these new channels from Sky are a pretty clever tactic for competing with Netflix and other streaming services. Take the "Sky" off the front, and you're left with genres -- you're left with the headings/categories along the top of your TV screen when you're looking for something to watch. So you're not only able to claim you are broadcasting more channels, but you're also making the transition from linear TV to catch-up seamless.

Sky started this with the "Sky Kids" branding -- in that case, it was purely on demand, there was no equivalent channel -- and they must have felt that the formula worked. Making extensive use of their partners' content library, but pushing the master brand.

In the viewers' minds, they will hope that the Sky brand becomes synonymous with, well, whatever it is they want to watch!

We have News, Sports, Cinema, Kids, Crime, Comedy, History and (soon) Documentaries... quite a line-up.

For that reason, the History (channel) branding just about works; SyFy would be more of a push, and E! definitely wouldn't work.

I agree that Sky E! wouldn't work.

If they were to rebrand it, it would probably end up being Sky Entertainment, given that it's often referred to as E! Entertainment, but I think it's more likely to remain as E! for now.