About home+

home+

home+ is an Israeli home and design television channel operated by Talit Communications. Known in Hebrew as Beit+, the channel specialises in interior design and architecture, broadcasting in English and Hebrew, and is carried on the HOT cable platform, on yes and on Cellcom TV+. Its present identity dates from the end of 2010, but its history begins earlier: the channel was created in 2009 when Talit Communications acquired two channels from Germany's 360 Channels group, merged the acquired home channel with its own Baby+ channel, and launched the combined service as Home and Family on 1 September 2009. A rebranding in March 2010 and a renaming at the end of that year produced the home+ channel that Israeli viewers know today.

The channel's remit, as defined at its 2009 launch, joined home design to family life: content for parents and for lovers of design and lifestyle, covering home design, do-it-yourself, architecture, gardening, tips for managing a family budget, child-raising, parenting and relationships. In its current form, Hebrew listings classify it more narrowly by genre as interior design and architecture, which reflects the design emphasis Talit added when the channel was upgraded and renamed in 2010. It is one of the small group of Israeli lifestyle channels to have survived, under one operator, from the cable and satellite era into the age of internet television services.

Predecessors: Beit+ and Baby+

home+ had two predecessor channels, one on each platform. The original Beit+ channel was broadcast only on HOT and had been launched in November 2004. Baby+ was broadcast only on yes and had been launched in January 2006, as a companion within Talit Communications' family of baby and children's services, which centred on the Baby TV channel that Talit had created and produced. Neither predecessor had national dual-platform reach on its own: the home channel belonged to cable, the baby channel to satellite.

That split was a product of the Israeli market's structure in the middle of the 2000s, when channels were frequently launched as exclusives of one platform or the other, and a channel's identity could be defined as much by where it could be seen as by what it showed. The 2009 merger that created home+ was, among other things, a solution to that split: by combining the two services, Talit created a single home and family channel that could be offered to both platforms at once.

The 2009 acquisition from 360 Channels

In June 2009, Talit Communications acquired from the German 360 Channels group the Beit+ and Karma channels, together with their full content library; Talit's own English-language company history records the same transaction as the acquisition of two channels from the 360 Channels group in Germany, the Home and Family channel and the Karma channel. The Home and Family channel was broadcast on the HOT cable platform and the yes satellite platform in Israel, and the Karma channel on the HOT cable platform. The acquisition therefore brought Talit both carriage and, importantly, a complete content library, the raw material from which a relaunched channel could be scheduled immediately.

For Talit, the purchase fitted an established pattern. The company founded by Yehuda Talit had moved from entertainment production into channel operation, creating Baby TV, launching the Junior children's channel with Iguana Productions in 2006, and representing international channels including France 24, Eurosport and, from 2009, the National Geographic channels in Israel. Buying existing home and lifestyle channels, rather than building a new one from nothing, extended that portfolio into the home category in a single step.

Merger and the launch of Home and Family

Following the acquisition, Talit decided to unite the Baby+ channel it owned with the Beit+ channel it had purchased, and to launch in their place the Home and Family channel, broadcasting content for parents and design and lifestyle enthusiasts. The unified channel began broadcasting on 1 September 2009, replacing the Beit+ channel on HOT and the Baby+ channel on yes. Hebrew reference accounts date the channel's period of activity from that day, 1 September 2009, under the Home and Family name.

The merged channel's declared content joined the two predecessors' worlds. From the home channel came home design, do-it-yourself, architecture and gardening; from the baby and family side came guidance on family budgeting, child-raising, parenting and relationships. It was, in effect, a channel about the household in the round: the physical home, the money that runs it and the family that lives in it, addressed to parents and homemakers as a single audience.

Programming

The channel's launch content was defined by that household remit: programmes on home design, on do-it-yourself projects, on architecture and on gardening, alongside practical lifestyle material including tips for managing the family budget, and programmes on raising children, parenting and couple relationships. The combination distinguished Home and Family from a pure design channel: its schedule treated design as one part of domestic life rather than as a specialist pursuit, and its family content gave it a daytime audience beyond viewers actively renovating or decorating.

When Talit upgraded the channel in 2010, the balance shifted toward design: the company's history records that the channel was upgraded and various design contents were added, a direction confirmed by the channel's present classification in Hebrew listings under the genres of interior design and architecture. The family and lifestyle strand of the 2009 launch thus gave way, over the channel's first year, to the home and design identity that the home+ name expresses and that the channel retains.

The launch investment

The September 2009 launch was a substantial relaunch rather than a simple renaming. It included a new graphic packaging and rebranding for the channel, together with the acquisition of approximately 450 hours of new content. A total of 3.5 million shekels was invested in the move. For a niche Israeli channel, that combination, hundreds of hours of fresh programming plus a complete on-screen redesign, signalled that Talit intended the merged channel to compete as a refreshed service in its own right rather than to continue as the sum of two small predecessors.

The acquired content library from 360 Channels and the 450 new hours together gave the channel the depth a daily schedule requires. Lifestyle channels are unusually dependent on catalogue volume, because their programmes are watched flexibly across the day rather than at appointment times; the launch investment addressed exactly that requirement, stocking the channel before its first broadcast day rather than building the library gradually.

The March 2010 relaunch

After about half a year, in March 2010, the channel underwent a further rebranding, in which half a million shekels was invested. In addition to replacing the graphic packaging and the logo, a new season was launched for the channel, which included a change to the broadcast schedule and to the channel's hours of activity, and the addition of new content, at a cost of one million shekels. Two rebranding exercises within the channel's first seven months, each with its own investment and the second with a new season and schedule attached, show an operator actively reshaping the merged service: first combining its two predecessors, then refining the combination's identity, hours and programme mix.

Talit Communications' own history describes the same 2010 step from the programming side: the Home and Family channel was upgraded and various design contents were added, as well as the channel's name being changed to home+. The rebrand and the content upgrade were one process, moving the channel from a general home and family service toward the design-led identity it has kept since.

Renaming to home+

At the end of 2010, the channel's name was changed to its current name, Beit+, rendered in Latin characters as home+. The renaming completed the sequence that had begun with the June 2009 acquisition: acquisition, merger, launch as Home and Family in September 2009, relaunch in March 2010, and finally a short, design-focused name that dropped the explicit family reference of the launch identity. The channel kept the plus sign that had belonged to its predecessor brands, Beit+ and Baby+, preserving a thread of continuity with both of the services from which it had been formed.

Under the home+ name, the channel settled into its long-term form: an Israeli home and design channel, owned by Talit Communications, broadcasting in English and Hebrew. Hebrew reference accounts list its period of activity as continuing from 1 September 2009, counted from the Home and Family launch, to the present, treating the successive names as stages of a single channel rather than as separate services, which is how this profile treats them as well.

Carriage today

Hebrew listings record home+ as broadcast on yes+, HOT and Cellcom TV+, with channel positions at 175 on HOT, 65 on yes+ and 91 on Cellcom TV+, and with video on demand availability on the platforms. That carriage repeats, in modern form, the dual-platform reach the channel was created to achieve in 2009: present on cable and on satellite, and extended to the mobile-operator television service that has since joined them. The channel's survival into the app-based services shows the same continuity as its schedule: a small specialist channel, held by one operator, carried across successive generations of Israeli television distribution.

Its package position also completes the logic of the 2009 merger. Beit+ had been a HOT-only channel and Baby+ a yes-only channel; their successor is listed on both platforms and beyond. The merger did what it was designed to do, turning two platform-exclusive services with partial reach into one national channel whose audience no longer depended on which infrastructure a household subscribed to.

Talit Communications, the operator

Talit Communications was founded in 1997 by Yehuda Talit, the Israeli entertainment businessman who had founded Talit Productions in 1977 and who died in 2019. The company's channel activities grew from production: it produced Baby TV, the channel for babies and toddlers combining entertainment with early educational programming; in 2007 it signed a long-term agreement under which it provided operations, broadcasting and production services for Baby TV worldwide; and it launched channels and representations across children's, news, sport and factual categories, including Junior in 2006, representation of France 24 and Eurosport, and the National Geographic channels from 2009. home+ was its entry into the home and lifestyle category, acquired rather than created, and then reshaped through the 2009 and 2010 relaunches.

That background matters to the channel's character. home+ was not launched by a broadcaster looking for a design channel in the abstract; it was assembled by a production and channels company that already ran family-oriented services, which explains the channel's founding blend of design with parenting, budgeting and relationships content, and its later narrowing toward design once Talit had tested the merged service with audiences.

Legacy

home+ is a compact example of how Israeli niche channels were actually built: not always launched fresh, but acquired, merged, stocked with hundreds of hours of content, rebranded twice in a year and renamed, until a durable service emerged. From the November 2004 launch of the original Beit+ on cable and the January 2006 launch of Baby+ on satellite, through the 3.5-million-shekel relaunch of September 2009 and the design upgrade of 2010, the channel's history traces the consolidation of Israel's platform-exclusive era into national, multi-platform specialist television. Operated throughout by Talit Communications and still listed on HOT, yes+ and Cellcom TV+, home+ remains the Israeli home and design channel that that process produced.