According to the Freeview EPG, next week ITV are taking advantage of the unused hour from 6pm-7pm on Mux A in England & NI, plus the former Tele-G slot in Scotland. LCN27 ITV2 +1 will be running 6pm-6am timesharing with LCN72 CITV.

This doesn't apply to Wales where ITV2 +1 runs 7pm to 6am timesharing with LCN46 Challenge.

Is this the first time that this hour will ever have been used in England and Northern Ireland? It certainly hasn't been used since Freeview began. What about ITV Digital?

I think you're right, because Tele-G started up in 1999 during On-Digital and it always was exclusive to DTT and generated by the Mux A licence holder.

I think the reason why the hour was always vacant in England and NI was because Mux A was only regionalised as far as Wales was concerned because S4C was only entitled to the Welsh part of the 50% of Mux A it was gifted. Therefore playing out Tele-G actually used up English resources and it was probably blanked out at English transmitters by altering the SI. If you remember CNN had to be removed from Mux A in NI when it was playing out gambling material, and restoring that turned out to be a real performance.

So in future I expect that Mux A / SDN will only remain regionalised as far as Wales is concerned with the other 3 nations having identical (national) programming.

I expect getting the 6pm-7pm hour back will be quite lucrative for ITV as it was a peak time hour. Also as ITV unwinds all the oddities on Mux A, it makes the multiplex more valuable.

Doesn't Channel 5 have advertising regions still? It definately used to, but they differed from C4's.

I think the space was used in ITV Digital days... I was under the impression teleG in Scotland was slotted between the end of TV Travel Shop at 1800 and the start of an ONrequest/ITV Select channel at 1900?

I may be wrong, however, I've slept since then! It could have just been taken from the ITV Select channel at the end, or the endless preview channels we also had.

When Channel 5 was on Freeview Mux A it only had the one advertising region for the whole of UK although satellite might have been different.

Since Sept 2009 Channel 5 has moved to Mux 2 / D3&4 which is fully regionalised and so they can use their 4 regions.

When Freeview started, the second Mux A stream was like this:-

0600-0900 41 ITV News Channel
0900-1800 13 S4C2 (Wales only)
1800-1900 8 Tele-G (Scotland only)

I would say that was based on ITV Digital former output. The 7pm-6am slot was later sold to Turner for TCM.

So whether the stream was going to Wales or Scotland, it didn't go anywhere else, which suggests to me that it was limited and probably originated from London with just one contribution circuit. So they couldn't produce different output in Scotland and Wales without more circuits. It's taken 9 years to resolve the unused hour.

Whats happened to tele G?

It closed down to make way for BBC Alba in Scotland only.

ITV2 +1 is back to 7pm starts from 4/6/11 according to the Freeview EPG.

I think one of the OnRequest/ITV Select streams shared with TeleG, so there was a break between the movies between 6 and 7pm

The LCN27 off air caption has been changed to state that "ITV2+1 will return at 1800" (except Wales) thus confirming the EPG change. The Freeview EPG is still back to 1900 on 4/6/11 and after and all the EPG off air wording refers to 1900 which now looks like a permanent mistake. Good old ITV cowboys.

Confirmed Hannington - both Mheg and EPG data how Ray Cathode described it. I assume in Wales it's still starting at 1900 as before.

And as per the changelog, ITV2 +1 sprang into action at 6pm today instead of 7pm yesterday in England, Scotland & Northern Ireland where it timeshares with CITV. In Wales the start time remains at 7pm because ITV2 +1 is timesharing with Challenge.

ITV2 +1 could now be brought forward to start at 4pm (not Wales) using the former Teachers TV slot which remains vacant. However I don't think it will be long before ITV2 +1 becomes a 24/7 channel again

i live in wales, i been wondering about itv2+1, as for the last few weeks it been funny and not following itv2 a hour later section in the day as it did before, so i am wondering that channel is a mess and i dont know what it is following!

can someone help me out on this one?

In Wales ITV2 +1 is only on from 7pm to 6am; elsewhere it is on 6pm to 6am.

so what is the channel following in the day? its confusing me!

See post #1

Challenge in Wales is on air from 6am to 7pm which timeshares with ITV2 +1, the reason why CITV is not available in Wales; because the 24 hour slot of Challenge in England, NI, Scotland is used by E4 in Wales. This is because of S4C having the E4 slot on D3&4 mux.

ah that explains it thanks x