[Stuart]

I think people know what's on each ITV channel without being spoon fed a genre name. You only end up broadcasting things that don't fit your chosen genre. I'd hardly call ITV4's showings of the 1960s series The Avengers as 'extreme'. So you potentially run the risk of putting people off before they've even had a look.

I understood why they added the '1' to the main channel, but not so much why they removed it, or why they created 'ITV2.5' and called it ITVBe.

Sky have so many channels that it's not worth using numbers to confuse people, so genres probably work best for them. Other than live sporting events, I suspect most of their viewers are simply downloading anyway.