Abacat's What If's/ITV3

**ITV3** is a British free-to-air television channel owned by ITV Digital Channels, a division of ITV plc. The channel was first launched on 1 October 1996 as **Granada Plus**. ITV3 is the sixth-largest UK television channel by audience share and the largest after the five main terrestrial services. The channel is known for repeats of ITV dramas and comedies, including sequential reruns of *Agatha Christie's Poirot*, *Coronation Street*, *Emmerdale*, *Heartbeat*, *Inspector Morse,* A Touch of Frost, Neighbours, Home and Away, *On the Buses*, *Man About the House*, *Surgical Spirit*, *The Two of Us*, *Spitting Image*, *Mr. Bean*, *George and Mildred*, *Watching*, *Minder* and *Rising Damp*, amongst others.

## History

Granada Plus was launched on 1 October 1996 at 7pm. From launch, the channel initially showed only programmes made originally by Granada Television and London Weekend Television (itself recently acquired by Granada Television), such as *On the Buses*, *Crown Court*, *The Comedians* and *The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club*. One of the channel's biggest attractions was a thrice-daily repeat of classic *Coronation Street*, with a five episode omnibus every weekend. The channel started showing episodes in original broadcast order from April 1976, before restarting from the very beginning in December 2005 to celebrate the programme 45th anniversary. After Plus had secured the rights to show programmes originally made by Yorkshire Television, they started showing classic episodes of *Emmerdale*, usually straight after *Coronation Street*, at 9:30 in the morning, 12:30 in the afternoon and 6:30 in the evening each weekday.

Many of these programmes would have been unshown since their original transmissions, and hence were of value to those interested in classic television, but these early schedules lacked the commercial appeal of rival channel UK Gold, which had long since moved from showing little-seen gems to showing television's 'greatest hits'.

It was not long before Granada Plus revamped their on-screen identity, and in order to look more contemporary, they started showing more recent programmes made by the ITV network (at the time, Granada were busy buying up old rivals such as Yorkshire Television and Tyne Tees Television, in preparation for a unified ITV plc), as well as programme stock which had been originally shown on the BBC. Granada Plus also began screening many classic US shows, which became the primary focus of the channel for a time and led the channel to rebrand as Plus, whilst UK shows were given less prominence.

The future of Plus came into doubt by early 2002, when ITV had planned for a new channel similar to Plus to be launched. Originally conceived as 'ITV Gold', it evolved in it's conception to ITV3. It would have been originally launched on Chorus, BSB, NTL, Telewest, Multicable, with a later launch on Sky in July 2003, likely due to ITV rejecting a deal to encrypt ITV3, and the limitations faced by Sky boxes in exceeding the 500 channel limit. Due to the similarity in both channels' content, many believed that ITV3 would replace Plus, only for this rumour to be frequently debunked by GSB themselves. ITV also looked to either sell or close the GSB channels.

Granada managed to acquire BSB's 50% stake in Granada Satellite Broadcasting in August 2002, and it's own stakes quickly became shared with their fellow ITV network operators to form ITV Multichannels plc (which also taken control of ITV2, the ITN News Channel and the CITV channel), practically confirming the end of Plus. The channel's management team were retained from the Granada era.

19 January 2003 was set as the launch date for the relaunched ITV3, which promised to fully make use of the ITV archives and screen a mix of ITV's "greatest hits" and little-seen gems. This would be at the expense of the American classics, the rights to which were handed over to BSB from January 2003, and which were used on their own new channel, Galaxy Gold.