Bliss (TV channel)


Bliss was a British music television channel owned and operated by CSC Media Group.

History

It launched in March 2006 and was advertised as Total Chill-out Classics. The channel played classic pop songs and music from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, along with hours dedicated to love songs and power ballads. Every day for three hours at 9am and 7pm, there was a weekly themed slot, such as Blissful Divas, music from female artists, or Bliss at The Movies, music from films. These themed slots changed every Monday.
Throughout the year the channel had days dedicated to boy bands, love songs and other types of music depending on dates such as Valentines Day. The channel also shows some newer music videos which fit in with its chill-out theme.
For the channel's original on-screen look, the Bliss logo was a gold colour with a shine moving across it every few seconds. The logo was placed in the bottom left-hand corner during music videos and the song information was shown in a gold coloured bar at the start and near the end of each music video. The channel's identity was also seen before and after advert breaks when the Bliss logo slowly came out of an opening flower.
During 2008, Bliss received a new look, with its logo changing to plain white lettering with 'BLISS' in capitals. The song information now appears in a cloud type graphic which forms in the middle of the screen. As of May 2010, the song information appeared at the bottom of the screen. The logo is also seen before and after advert breaks when a growing flower or flying butterfly goes across the screen, revealing the Bliss logo behind it.
The channel replaced another music channel called The Amp because it failed to reach a wide enough audience.
Bliss was available 24 hours a day on Sky channel 376 and was part of a bouquet of music channels owned by CSC Media.
On 12 May 2008, a +1 timeshift channel called Bliss +1 was launched. It was available 24 hours a day on Sky channel 363. On 2 June 2008, Bliss +1 was closed to make way for a 24-hour stream for AnimeCentral, a channel also owned by CSC Media Group. This allowed Pop Girl, which used to time-share with AnimeCentral, to extend its hours to 24 hours a day.
On 3 March 2008, the Bliss website was launched. The website included TV listings, music videos, news, competitions and an online community area. Several programmes on Bliss made use of the website, for example welovebliss.com was a programme which played the most requested songs, as voted for on the Bliss website. Throughout November and December, Bliss became "Blissmas" and was a Christmas music channel and it played mostly Christmas music 24/7.
On 1 February 2011, Bliss launched on the free-to-air satellite platform Freesat on channel 517. It moved to channel 506 on 13 September 2012. It was removed along with Flava on 21 July 2014.
Bliss was axed on 27 November 2015 after nine years, while in the middle of its annual run as Blissmas. From 2018 onwards, Christmas music will move to its sister music channel Chart Show Hits.

Bliss removals

On 6 November 2007, Bliss along with sister music channels Scuzz and Flaunt, were removed from Virgin Media's ex-NTL platform as a deal with Chart Show Channels could not be made to make the channels available on the ex-Telewest platform as well. For this reason, the channels were dropped.

Programming

Normal programming