[interestednovice]

And of course Sky Arts is pretty much what BBC Four would look like with a fatter budget.
BBC Four were a bit selective with the DOG as well particularly when they aired things like operas and foreign film, but would leave it on for pretty much everything else.  Sky Arts just took that to its logical conclusion and followed the rest of the Sky branded channels.

With regards to Mix, idents look nice, but having looked at the schedule, can't see anything that Pick probably wasn't already showing, so unless I'm missing something which I probably am, this looks at this time like the same programming in new packaging.

I think the idea is that primetime will include a slot of recent, fairly-appealing Sky shows (with Mix acting as a kind of FTA version of Sky Showcase) but the rest of the time will be mainly filler programmes, of no real value, that they can put out cheaply - so similar to how Pick was, but possibly with some better primetime programming. I imagine this might be phased in over time to warm viewers up to the idea.

Meanwhile, now that the channel is Sky branded, if they do want to do something more significant (such as a Sky Sports free weekend) they can, as and when they want to, because it’s more obviously a Sky channel.