The Children's Channel

The Children's Channel launched in 1984, almost exclusively to cable households owing to the low proliferation of domestic satellite dishes in the UK and Europe at the time, and originally operated by Starstream who were backed by British Telecom, DC Thomson, Thames Television and Thorn EMI.

In March 1989, The Children's Channel started airing free-to-air on Astra 1A,[1] airing from 5am to 10am on weekdays and from 5am to 12pm on weekends, time-sharing with Lifestyle. Following the launch of the Astra 1B-satellite in 1991, The Children's Channel expanded to broadcast until 5pm each day, time-sharing with JSTV. In 1990, Flextech acquired its first stake in the company,[2][3] beating United Artists Cable International to gain a stake. In 1991, United bought its own stake in The Children's Channel and won the management contract to run it.[4] In late 1993, Flextech held talks with Tele-Communications and acquired TCI's European programming business in exchange for shares, giving TCI a 50%-60% stake in the enlarged Flextech group.[5] The deal was completed which resulted in Flextech increasing its stake from 50.1%[6] to 75%.[7]

In 1992, The Children's Channel launched an evening block showing programming of greater interest to older children and teenagers. The segment, called simply TCC, aired from 5pm to 7pm, and featured a number of home-produced programmes, such as CDQ and TVFM, as well as American imports including Saved by the Bell. During the day, The Children's Channel continued targeting younger children, and a large amount of its programming output was still archive animated series from the 1980s. As time went on, the TCC block extended its hours, initially starting half an hour earlier at 4.30pm, until the focus on teen programmes eventually became more prominent across The Children's Channel, which became known as TCC all day long.

In 1993, it cut back its air hours to 6am to 5pm, allowing Family Channel to share its space with The Children's Channel, now a subscription service via the Sky Multichannels package. In 1995, The Children's Channel introduced programmes for toddlers and preschoolers called Tiny TCC.

By June 1995, Flextech completed its acquisition of The Children's Channel when it acquired the remaining 25.1% stake in Starstream for £15m.[8][9]

In mid 1996, Flextech were in talks with Fox and News Corp to sell of a 50% stake in The Children's Channel; however, extremely lengthy negotiations made it impossible to secure a deal. Flextech tried to undertake negotiations to secure a different form of investment in The Children's Channel, but decided to refocus on the teen and youth markets instead.[10] In turn, in February 1997, all the programmes targeting older children which The Children's Channel was by then airing were split off into Trouble with TCC reverted to the original name of The Children's Channel and continuing to screen programmes for younger children, running side by side with Trouble in 1997, before eventually closing down British and Irish operations both unexpectedly and silently in April 1998 at 5pm after 14 years for unknown reasons. Upon the closure of TCC UK, Cable & Wireless carried the TCC Nordic feed for a few months due to the company's anger at the closure of TCC at such short notice, while Trouble started targeting teenagers and young adults, thus fully replacing The Children's Channel after it closed down.

However, due to a pre-agreed contract signed some years before to air The Children's Channel in Scandinavia until October 2000, Flextech created an advertisement-free version of TCC known as TCC Nordic to fulfil this requirement to air until October 2000 as arranged before finally ceasing transmission. As this service was only fulfilling a contractual requirement, it was totally automated and showed exactly the same four weeks of programming on a constant loop.

The website stayed running until late 2005.