Premiere (TV channel)
Premiere, branded on screen as Prem1ere, was a British subscription film channel of the 1980s and the first subscription movie channel to broadcast to Europe by satellite. It launched on 1 September 1984, carrying feature films to the small cable networks of the day and to satellite viewers, at a time when British multichannel television was in its infancy. Through mergers it absorbed its principal rivals — Mirrorvision in 1986, the Star Channel and the Home Video Channel in 1987 — becoming the single British satellite-delivered subscription film service. Despite that consolidation it accumulated losses of around £10 million, and increased competition from the newly launched Sky Movies ended its independence: Premiere closed in July 1989.
The early cable and satellite film market
Premiere belonged to the first generation of British cable and satellite channels, which arrived in a rush in 1984 and 1985. Sky Channel, Music Box and The Children's Channel were among its contemporaries on satellite, while a series of film services competed for the tiny number of cabled homes. The Entertainment Network, known as TEN, was launched on 29 March 1984 by Robert Maxwell, backed by interests including Rediffusion, Visionhire, Plessey and the Rank Organisation; it went bust within a year and was replaced on 2 June 1985 by Mirrorvision, a film channel from the stable of the Daily Mirror. Other rivals included Bravo and the Home Video Channel, the latter distributed, like several services of the period, by sending videotapes to cable operators rather than by satellite.
The economics were forbidding. Cable franchising had covered large areas on paper, but few homes were actually connected: in its final report the Cable Authority recorded that by the end of 1990 only 828,000 homes had been passed by broadband cable and only 149,000 were subscribing. Every film channel of the mid-1980s was therefore fighting for a minute paying audience, and consolidation was inevitable.
Launch and ownership
Premiere launched on 1 September 1984, the same day as The Children's Channel, and styled itself Prem1ere on air. Contemporary accounts of its ownership describe a consortium in which Thorn EMI held the largest shareholding, with Goldcrest Films also involved and minority stakes held by American film and premium-television interests including 20th Century Fox, Columbia, Showtime and HBO, each bringing relationships with the Hollywood studios whose films the channel needed. The channel's operating consortium was based at 6 and 7 D'Arblay Street in Soho, Westminster, in the heart of the British film trade.
The American involvement mattered. HBO and Showtime were the established premium movie networks of the United States, and their presence in a British satellite film channel reflected the expectation that the American pay-television model — a monthly subscription for recent films, shown uncut and without advertising breaks — could be transplanted to Europe. Premiere's programming model resembled that of its rivals: an annual slate of around 200 films, each repeated a number of times, with new films shown several times in their first week and then rested for months.
Programming: films and an after-school sideline
Feature films were the channel's core, but Premiere also carried children's television in an after-school slot, used as filler around the film schedule. That sideline gave the channel two notable firsts in British television history. Premiere showed ThunderCats before its BBC One launch, and it was the first channel to show Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. For the small number of children in cabled or satellite homes, the channel was briefly a source of American animation ahead of the terrestrial networks — an early illustration of how the new channels could outbid or outrun the established broadcasters for particular programmes.
Plans for expansion were discussed in the channel's early years, including launches in other European countries, with negotiations under way in the Netherlands, Germany, France and Scandinavia. They came to little: the differing release dates of feature films from country to country made it complicated to plan a schedule that satisfied the requirements of several markets at once, and a pan-European film channel proved unfeasible. Premiere remained a British service.
Merger with Mirrorvision
Robert Maxwell's media interests reshaped the channel in 1986. In April 1986 Maxwell Communications acquired the Thorn EMI and Goldcrest shareholdings, becoming the majority shareholder with 51 per cent, and merged the business with the rival satellite film channel Mirrorvision — itself the successor to Maxwell's failed Entertainment Network, relaunched on 2 June 1985 from the Daily Mirror stable. The merger, effective on 1 April 1986, created a single UK satellite-delivered subscription film channel under the consortium name The Prem1ere Partnership, and the combined service continued to be called Premiere. For Maxwell, who was simultaneously building interests in cable and in Portuguese television ventures, the deal removed his channel's most direct competitor at a stroke.
Absorbing Star Channel and the Home Video Channel
Consolidation continued in 1987. Star Channel, operated by British Telecommunications plc, had launched in August 1986 as an alternative film service broadcasting between 6.30pm and 2.00am, distributed to several cable operators on videotape rather than by satellite. In July 1987 Star Channel closed following its merger with Premiere, a move expected to reduce the remaining field of film services to Bravo and the Home Video Channel alongside Premiere itself. Also in March 1987, Ealing Cable sold the Home Video Channel to Premiere; the new owner continued the channel's existing operational model, including the distribution of tapes to cable operators, and increased its broadcasting hours.
By the end of 1987, therefore, Premiere had absorbed or acquired almost every British film service of its generation. It was the survivor of the first cable film war — but survival had been bought by mergers between loss-making businesses, not by growth in the audience, and the underlying problem of a tiny subscriber base remained.
Competition from Sky Movies and closure
The decisive threat came from satellite rather than cable. On 5 February 1989 Sky Television launched its four-channel package on the Astra satellite, including Sky Movies, backed by first-run deals with major Hollywood studios — 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., Columbia, Orion and Buena Vista among them — and promoted to a rapidly growing number of dish owners. Sky Movies was initially free-to-air as part of Sky's package, and it became a subscription service in February 1990. Premiere, dependent on cable homes and older satellite distribution, could not match that reach or those film deals.
Premiere closed in July 1989, having accumulated losses of around £10 million. Its final film was Twice in a Lifetime. The channel ended with a final announcement thanking its viewers and the businesses that had helped with its transmission, followed by a final ident. It had outlived TEN, Mirrorvision, Star Channel and the other film services of 1984, but the market it had pioneered was inherited by Sky.
Legacy
Premiere's historical significance is greater than its audience figures suggest. It demonstrated, five years before Sky Movies, that British viewers would pay a subscription for films on television, and its ownership — British film companies alongside HBO and Showtime — was an early attempt to build a European premium channel on the American model. Its mergers chart the consolidation of the first cable era, in which too many channels chased too few subscribers.
Assessment
The pattern of Premiere's failure is equally instructive: rights to recent films were the decisive asset, and once a better-funded rival secured the studios' first-run output and a mass satellite audience, the pioneer had nothing left to sell. The subscription film business Premiere began in 1984 became, under Sky, one of the foundations of British pay television, and Premiere's five-year run remains the clearest early evidence of both the demand for that business and the scale of investment needed to sustain it.
