About 5Plus

5Plus

5Plus, also styled 5PLUS and known in fuller form as Sport 5 Plus, is an Israeli pay television sports channel operated by the Sports Channel company, the broadcaster best known to viewers as Sport 5. Launched in 2001, it holds a particular place in Israeli television history as the first subsidiary channel ever created by Sport 5, the moment at which a single pioneering sports channel began its transformation into a multi-channel pay-TV family. From its base within the RGE Group, which owns the Sports Channel, 5Plus was conceived as a subscription service carrying the live events, competitions and imported programming for which the original channel no longer had room. More than two decades later it remains a working part of the Sport 5 network, available through Israel's cable, satellite and internet television platforms and listed by international programme guides as an Israeli carrier for competitions including the UEFA Champions League and France's Ligue 1.

Origins in the Sports Channel

To understand 5Plus it is necessary to begin with its parent. The Sports Channel first aired in 1990 on channel 5, the position from which the entire network takes its name, and it arrived when Israeli television was still dominated by a small number of generalist broadcasters. A dedicated channel showing sport around the clock was a novelty, and studies of Israeli sports media credit those early years of Channel 5 with raising the standard of local sports broadcasting: the channel took live coverage of the Israeli basketball league seriously, presented American NBA games alongside the domestic product, and gave airtime to sports such as volleyball and handball that had previously struggled for television exposure in Israel. As multichannel cable and satellite television expanded during the 1990s, however, a single channel could no longer contain the volume of rights the company was acquiring, and pressure grew for additional capacity. 5Plus was the company's answer to that pressure.

Launch in 2001 as the first subsidiary channel

5Plus was created in 2001 as a subscription-fee channel, the first spin-off in Sport 5's history. Its arrival changed the economics and the editorial balance of the network. Content that had previously appeared on the main channel began to migrate to the new service, and reference accounts of the network note that after 2001 the original 5Sport channel lost much of its most notable programming to its younger sibling, although the two continued to work in tandem on the biggest properties. Among the programmes associated with the young 5Plus were cut-down international versions of the American wrestling shows WWE Raw and WWE Friday Night SmackDown, an indication that the channel was never intended to be only an overflow pipe for live matches: it was also a home for imported sports entertainment that broadened the network's appeal beyond football and basketball. The launch established the template that the Sports Channel would follow for the next two decades, adding further specialised channels whenever its rights portfolio outgrew the existing line-up.

Programming and the overflow role

The enduring function of 5Plus within the network is that of the overflow channel to 5Sport. When several events take place at the same time, or when the main channel is committed to a flagship fixture, 5Plus absorbs the additional live coverage so that subscribers can still follow the competitions the network holds. International channel guides describe its schedule as spanning both domestic and international competition across a wide range of disciplines, including football, basketball, motorsport, handball, volleyball, baseball, mixed martial arts and ice hockey, supplemented by highlights programmes and sports news shows. In football, the competitions documented on the channel include the English Premier League, the French Ligue 1, the Austrian Bundesliga, Japan's J1 League and Australia's A-League, alongside the UEFA Champions League. That breadth is deliberate: 5Plus is the channel that allows the Sports Channel to honour a large and varied rights portfolio without forcing every event to compete for a single slot on the main feed.

The UEFA Champions League partnership with 5Sport

The clearest illustration of the working relationship between 5Plus and its parent channel is the UEFA Champions League. Accounts of the Sports Channel record that, even after the migration of content to pay services, 5Sport continued to show Champions League matches in tandem with the 5Plus channel, the two feeds dividing the fixtures between them on European nights. The arrangement was formalised in the network's rights planning: when the Sports Channel acquired exclusive live Israeli rights to the Champions League for the three seasons from 2012-13 to 2014-15, in a deal brokered by UEFA's sales agency TEAM Marketing, it committed to showing three live matches on each match night spread across its bouquet of channels, which was reported at the time as Sport 5, Sport 5+ and 5Gold, with a weekly highlights programme on the main Sport 5 channel and mobile and internet rights included. 5Plus was therefore not a peripheral extra but one of the designated carriers of the most valuable club competition in European football during that cycle.

High definition and the February 2012 HD feed

5Plus began life as a standard-definition channel, in keeping with Israeli television at the turn of the century. Its technical coming of age arrived in February 2012, when a high-definition feed of the channel was launched, a date recorded in international channel profiles of 5Plus. The timing placed 5Plus within the network's wider HD transition: the Sports Channel had already launched a dedicated HD service in December 2007 carrying Champions League football, NBA playoff games and Wimbledon, and the early 2010s saw the group's established channels progressively upgraded rather than replaced. Channel guides note that both the standard-definition and high-definition feeds of 5Plus could remain available through different pay-TV carriers across Israel, reflecting the uneven pace at which households and platforms adopted HD equipment. A further network-wide step came in October 2018, when the launch of the new 5Stars channel as part of a major overhaul of the Sport 5 network was followed by HD feeds being handed to all of its sister channels.

Distribution on HOT, yes and the newer platforms

Like the rest of the Sports Channel family, 5Plus built its audience on Israel's two historic multichannel platforms, the HOT cable network and the yes satellite service, through which the company's channels have long been available. Its distribution widened as Israel's television market opened to internet-delivered competitors in the 2010s. In May 2017 Partner Communications announced a long-term agreement with RGE under which customers of its new Partner TV venture would be offered RGE's five sports channels — Sport 5, 5 Plus, 5 Live, 5 Gold and 5 HD — with Sport 5 and 5 Plus specifically to be broadcast in high definition. The Globes business newspaper's report of the deal also captured 5Plus's settled position in the market's pricing structure: on the rival Cellcom TV service, Sport 5 and 5 Plus were the two channels included within the standard package, while viewers wanting the additional premium Sport 5 channels paid extra, at a monthly rate reported as matching that charged by yes and HOT. 5Plus thus sat in the accessible tier of the network, the first step beyond the main channel rather than part of the premium add-on.

The pay-channel debate

The creation of 5Plus also opened an argument that has followed the Sports Channel ever since: the migration of valued content from an established channel into subscription spin-offs. Because 5Plus was the first such spin-off, it was where the pattern began, and Israeli press commentary of the period, including a much-cited Haaretz critique of multichannel sports television published in January 2007, complained about the erosion of the main channel's offering in favour of pay services. The criticism intensified when the network extended the same model in March 2007 with the launch of 5Live and 5Gold, which viewers greeted with complaints about yet more content moving behind paywalls. Viewed from the broadcaster's side, the strategy reflected the rising cost of sports rights and the need for multiple windows to exploit them; viewed from the sofa, it meant that following Israeli and European sport increasingly required a bundle of channels rather than one. 5Plus stands at the head of that story as the channel where the model was first tested in 2001.

Ownership and the RGE Group

5Plus is owned through the Sports Channel by the RGE Group, and its corporate history mirrors the consolidation of Israeli media in the 2000s. The group began as Aviv Giladi Holdings, also known as United Media Group, established on 10 March 1999, when Aviv Giladi already held a 25 per cent stake in JCS Sports, the company that ran the Sports Channel. United Media Group bought a majority share in JCS Sports on 22 March 2004 and became its sole shareholder on 29 November 2006; in September 2006 the group had been renamed RGE, short for Recanati Giladi Entertainment, after its two principals. Len Blavatnik's Access Industries bought a 20 per cent stake in RGE in June 2008 and increased it to 33 per cent in 2010. The group is today controlled by the Recanati family through the Naftali Group, with Keshet Media Group holding a 25 per cent minority stake, and it operates from a complex in western Herzliya. Alongside the Sport 5 channels, RGE's portfolio includes the Children's Channel, the Logi channel and the franchise for the Knesset Channel, making 5Plus one asset within one of Israel's dominant media groups.

Digital presence and Sport5.co.il

Although 5Plus is a linear television channel, its public face is inseparable from the Sports Channel's shared digital operation at Sport5.co.il, the website through which the network publishes news, results, schedules and video for all of its channels. Listings services direct viewers checking where a particular fixture will be shown in Israel to the family's channels collectively, and 5Plus appears in those listings as the named Israeli carrier for individual matches, particularly in competitions such as Ligue 1 where the network spreads fixtures across its feeds. The company behind the channels describes itself as Israel's largest sports media outlet, combining its television channels with what it calls the nation's most influential sports website, and 5Plus benefits from that integration: a match shown on the channel is promoted, reported and archived within the same digital ecosystem as the main channel's biggest events. In June 2023 the parent group also entered the streaming television market directly through FreeTV, a service RGE operates in partnership with Keshet, underlining how the environment in which 5Plus is distributed continues to shift from cable and satellite towards internet delivery.

Legacy and significance

5Plus matters less for any single programme than for what it started. When it launched in 2001, Sport 5 ceased to be a single channel and became a network, and every subsequent addition to the family — 5Live and 5Gold in 2007, the HD and short-lived 3D services that followed, and the 5Stars and 4K channels of the later overhaul — followed the path it cut. Its programming record, from WWE wrestling in its early years to Champions League nights shared with the main channel and league football from England, France, Austria, Japan and Australia, shows a channel designed to make a large rights portfolio usable. Its place in the basic tier of Israeli sports packages, confirmed in the platform deals of the late 2010s, kept it close to the mainstream of the audience rather than at the premium margin. For historians of Israeli television, 5Plus is the clearest early example of the country's sports broadcasting moving from a one-channel public-service inheritance to the bundled, subscription-driven model that defines it today.