About 5Live

5Live

5Live, also styled 5LIVE and known in fuller form as Sport 5 Live, is an Israeli pay television sports channel operated by the Sports Channel company, the broadcaster known to audiences as Sport 5 and owned by the RGE Group. Launched in March 2007, at the same time as its archive-focused sibling 5Gold, 5Live was created for a single, clearly defined purpose: live sport. Where the main Sport 5 channel mixed live events with news, discussion and magazine programming, and where 5Plus had since 2001 carried the network's first wave of subscription content, 5Live gave the group a dedicated feed for live broadcasts, able to absorb fixtures and events that clashed with one another or with the schedules of the older channels. It remains one of the family of Sport 5 channels distributed in Israel through cable, satellite and internet television platforms, and one of the five RGE sports channels named in the network's carriage agreements with newer operators.

The Sport 5 family before 2007

5Live was the product of a network that had been growing for nearly two decades. The original Sports Channel first aired in 1990, taking its Sport 5 name from its position on channel 5, and established itself as Israel's dedicated home for televised sport, raising the production standard of domestic basketball coverage and bringing competitions from volleyball and handball to the NBA before a broad Israeli audience. In 2001 the company launched 5Plus, its first subscription subsidiary, and discovered both the commercial value and the public controversy of moving attractive content into pay channels. By the middle of the 2000s the group's rights portfolio, spanning Israeli football and basketball and a long list of international properties, regularly produced evenings on which more live events were available than the two existing channels could show. The next expansion, when it came in 2007, was therefore functional rather than decorative: the network needed a channel whose schedule could be given over entirely to whatever was happening live.

Launch in March 2007

The Sports Channel launched 5Live in March 2007, together with 5Gold, in a paired expansion that divided the network's needs neatly between them: 5Live for live sport as it happened, and 5Gold for repeats of classic sporting action from the archive. The launch made 5Live the third distinct programme channel in the family after 5Sport and 5Plus, and it was followed within the same year by the group's move into high definition, when a dedicated HD channel carrying the UEFA Champions League, the NBA playoffs and Wimbledon began on 23 December 2007. The timing is significant. Israeli multichannel television was mature, competition for sports rights was intensifying, and the value of a rights portfolio increasingly depended on a broadcaster's ability to show everything it had bought. A live-only channel was the mechanism that allowed the Sports Channel to promise rights holders and subscribers that simultaneous events would be broadcast rather than recorded, shortened or dropped.

A channel built for live sport

The editorial identity of 5Live is defined by immediacy. Its remit, as recorded in descriptions of the network, is live sports broadcasts, and its schedule is therefore shaped by the sporting calendar rather than by the fixed programme junctions of a general channel. On a crowded European football night, during a major tennis tournament, or when Israeli domestic fixtures overlap with international events, 5Live provides the additional live window the network requires. This distinguishes it from every other member of the family: 5Sport carries the flagship presentation and the network's studio journalism, 5Plus works as the established overflow and subscription companion, 5Gold looks backwards to classic action, and the later HD, 4K and 5Stars services are defined by picture quality or premium positioning. 5Live alone is defined by the live moment itself, and that simplicity has kept its role stable even as the rest of the line-up has been repeatedly reorganised around it.

Simultaneous coverage and the family rights portfolio

Judging 5Live requires looking at the inventory it exists to carry. The Sports Channel's documented broadcasting portfolio includes selected matches from the Israeli Premier League, the Israeli Basketball Super League and its League Cup, the Israeli handball and volleyball super leagues, the Toto Cup and Liga Leumit, alongside international properties including the UEFA Champions League, EuroLeague basketball, Wimbledon, Formula One, the Davis Cup and its women's equivalent, the NBA, NFL, NHL and Major League Baseball, the Olympic Games, and league football from Scotland, Austria and France. No single channel could schedule that volume of live material, much of it concentrated into the same evening and weekend hours, and rights are routinely shared across the bouquet so that several matches from the same competition can be shown at once. 5Live is the pressure valve in that system. When the Champions League deal for 2012-13 to 2014-15, for example, committed the network to three live matches per match night across its channels with a highlights programme on the main channel, it demonstrated the multi-feed logic of which 5Live is a permanent part.

Viewer criticism and the pay-TV argument

The arrival of 5Live was not universally welcomed, and the reaction forms an essential part of its history. Contemporary accounts of the March 2007 launch record that the two new channels were met with great criticism from viewers, who complained about the further loss of content from the established channels in favour of pay channels. The complaint had a history: the creation of 5Plus in 2001 had already shifted notable programming behind a subscription, and Israeli newspaper commentary in early 2007, including a Haaretz critique of multichannel sports television, attacked the fragmentation of sports coverage across an expanding set of paid services. For subscribers, 5Live embodied the dilemma of the multichannel era in its purest form. It genuinely increased the amount of live sport that could be watched in Israel, but it also meant that an event a viewer wanted might now sit on a third or fourth channel rather than on the Sport 5 feed they already received. That tension between expanded choice and expanded cost defined the public reputation of the 2007 expansion.

Distribution across HOT, yes, Cellcom TV and Partner TV

5Live reached its audience through the same platforms as the rest of the Sports Channel family, principally the HOT cable network and the yes satellite service, on which the company's channels have long been carried. Its position in the market's tiering became clear as new internet-based operators entered Israeli television in the 2010s. Reporting on Cellcom TV's sports offering in 2017 explained that, after an introductory period in which all five Sport 5 channels had been included in its general package, only Sport 5 and 5 Plus remained included, with the premium channels available for an additional monthly payment reported as 52 shekels, the same fee charged by yes and HOT. 5Live accordingly sat in that premium layer of the family. In May 2017, Partner Communications announced a long-term agreement with RGE under which its new Partner TV service would offer all five of RGE's sports channels — Sport 5, 5 Plus, 5 Live, 5 Gold and 5 HD — confirming 5Live's place as a standard component of the complete Sport 5 bouquet that operators were expected to carry.

The HD era and the 2018 network overhaul

Although 5Live was born in the standard-definition era, its second decade was shaped by the network's picture-quality transformation. The Sports Channel had opened its HD story in December 2007, months after 5Live's launch, with a channel showing Champions League football, NBA playoff games and Wimbledon, later adding coverage of the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games and Formula One; HD availability extended to both yes HD and HOT HD customers. An experiment with a 3D channel followed in April 2011 before closing that September because of low demand. The decisive step for the older channels came on 8 October 2018, when the Sports Channel launched 5Stars as part of a major overhaul of the network: unlike most of its sisters, 5Stars began as a high-definition channel, and its arrival was followed by HD feeds being handed to all of the network's sister channels, bringing services such as 5Live into the HD standard that viewers had come to expect. A 4K channel subsequently joined the family, and a temporary channel was even created for UEFA Euro 2024, but 5Live's live remit survived each reorganisation unchanged.

Ownership within the RGE Group

5Live is owned, through the Sports Channel, by the RGE Group, whose own formation explains much about the network's expansion. The group traces its history to Aviv Giladi Holdings, known as United Media Group, established on 10 March 1999, at a time when Aviv Giladi held a 25 per cent stake in JCS Sports, the company then running the Sports Channel. United Media Group purchased Noga Communications in November 2000, took a majority share in JCS Sports on 22 March 2004 and became its sole shareholder on 29 November 2006, renaming itself RGE — Recanati Giladi Entertainment — in September 2006, shortly before the launch of 5Live. Len Blavatnik's Access Industries acquired 20 per cent of RGE in June 2008 and raised its holding to 33 per cent in 2010, and the group is now controlled by the Recanati family through the Naftali Group with Keshet Media Group holding a 25 per cent minority stake. RGE operates from a complex in western Herzliya and runs, alongside the Sport 5 network, the Children's Channel, the Logi channel and the Knesset Channel franchise, so 5Live forms part of one of Israel's largest and most diversified television groups.

5Live in the streaming era

The environment around 5Live has changed more than the channel itself. The Sports Channel presents its television services together with Sport5.co.il, the group's sports news website, and promotes the combined operation as Israel's largest sports media outlet; fixtures carried on 5Live are surfaced through the same listings, news coverage and results services as those on the main channel. In June 2023, RGE itself became a platform operator, entering the multichannel television market through FreeTV, a streaming service run in partnership with Keshet, a sign that the group whose channels were built for cable and satellite now expects viewing to migrate online. For a live channel, that migration is natural territory: live sport is the genre least suited to delayed viewing and the one for which streaming services compete most aggressively. 5Live's founding proposition in 2007 — a feed that exists to show sport at the moment it happens — translates directly into the streaming era, even though the means of delivering it to the screen have been transformed since its launch.

Legacy and significance

5Live's significance lies in the clarity of its function and in what its launch revealed about Israeli sports television. Together with 5Gold, it completed the transition of Sport 5 from a channel with a single spin-off into a genuine bouquet, in which different feeds could be assigned different jobs: presentation, overflow, live capacity and archive. It also became the most visible symbol of the pay-channel controversy of 2007, attracting criticism precisely because it proved how much live content could be moved into subscription tiers once the capacity existed. Nearly two decades on, through HD conversion, the 2018 overhaul of the network and the arrival of streaming distribution, 5Live has kept the role it was given in March 2007. In a market where Israeli viewers divide their attention between the Sport 5 family, Charlton's Sport 1 to Sport 4 channels and other competitors, 5Live remains the Sport 5 network's dedicated answer to the simplest problem in sports broadcasting: too much happening at once, and an audience that expects to see all of it live.