About yes Oh

yes Oh

yes Oh was an Israeli television channel carried by yes, the country's satellite television provider, and listed in this directory at Kfar Saba in the Central District. Styled as yes Oh, it broadcast newer American and British television shows from HBO and other American premium cable channels, including AMC, Showtime, Starz and FX, on weeknights, with an emphasis on late-evening viewing. The channel began airing on 21 January 2012 on channel 14, replacing yes Real, and its whole schedule was simulcast in high definition as yes Oh HD on channel 14. After the cancellation of yes Oh, its shows were moved to other yes TV channels.

yes Oh was the premium corner of the yes TV Shows Channels family. Where yes Drama took mainstream drama, yes Action took thrillers and science fiction and yes Comedy took sitcoms, yes Oh gathered the series of the American premium cable world, the HBO-led catalogue that defined prestige television in that era, into a single channel. Its programme list, preserved in reference sources, reads as a catalogue of the period's most discussed series, and its history includes the chain of short-lived channels, Next, SCI FI and Real, whose slot it inherited.

The yes Platform

yes, formally D.B.S. Satellite Services (1998) Ltd, is Israel's sole direct broadcast satellite television provider and a subsidiary of Bezeq. Established in 1998, the company launched its broadcasting services in July 2000 via the Amos satellites, with multichannel television and video-on-demand. After unstable early years, it grew as subscribers responded to its new services and to its availability in rural areas beyond the cable networks, while the cable companies merged into HOT. The platform broadcasts more than two hundred television stations from around the world along with exclusive Israeli channels, and it pioneered the digital video recorder in Israel with yesMax in 2004.

The batch record for this profile lists yes Oh's city as Kfar Saba in the Central District and its official website as yes.co.il. The series channels were the platform's exclusive packaging of imported television, and yes Oh was created to give the premium part of that catalogue a distinct identity, separate from the broader drama channel, at a moment when HBO-style series had become the most prestigious product in international television.

The Family Before yes Oh

yes Oh joined a family with a long experimental history. In 2003, yes aired Summer Nights, a summer-only channel of night-time shows. In 2004 it aired yesREAL, with reality shows such as Survivor and The Amazing Race, and on 22 October 2004 it launched yesWeekend, broadcasting American and British shows at weekends until its cancellation on 4 March 2006. yesSTARS followed on 5 March 2006, and on 4 March 2007 expanded into yes stars 1, 2 and 3 on channels 12, 13 and 14.

On 14 December 2008, the numbered channels were replaced by genre channels: yes stars Drama, yes stars Action, yes stars Comedy, yes stars Base and yes stars Israeli. In 2010 the word stars was dropped, and the group became yes Drama, yes Action, yes Comedy, yes Next and yes Base. The fifth slot in that group, the one that changed most often, is the slot whose history leads directly to yes Oh.

Predecessors: yes Next, yes SCI FI and yes Real

On 17 January 2010, yes launched yes Next, styled as yes Next and formerly called yes stars Next, broadcasting American, British and Israeli television shows from all genres. The concept of the channel was to air shows aimed at younger demographics. It began airing on 17 January 2010 on channel 15 as part of that year's rebrand of the television shows channels, and it also aired shows that were available in HD in a high-definition simulcast on yes Next HD.

On 15 January 2011, yes Next went off air and was replaced by yes SCI FI, which broadcast American and British television shows of the science-fiction and thriller genres. The channel aired new episodes on weeknights, Sundays to Thursdays, and on Saturdays, with reruns on weekdays and weekends. On 3 July 2011, yes SCI FI was replaced by yes Real, which broadcast American and British television shows of the reality television genre, airing new episodes on weeknights and on Saturdays and reruns at other times. The reality channel itself revived a name with a long history on the platform, since temporary reality channels under the Real name had run in the summers of 2008 and 2009 as well as in the original yesREAL experiment. On 16 January 2012, yes Real was shut down, and five days later its replacement defined the slot completely differently.

Launch on 21 January 2012

yes Oh began airing on 21 January 2012 on channel 14, replacing yes Real. The batch record for this profile gives the launch as 16 January 2012, the date its predecessor closed, while reference listings record the first air date as 21 January 2012; the two dates mark the handover week in which the premium channel took over the slot. The channel's former names are recorded as yes Next, yes stars Next, yes SCI FI and yes Real, the chain of services that had occupied its position in the family.

The new channel's remit was stated plainly in reference summaries of the family: yes Oh aired shows of HBO and other shows from the rest of the American premium cable channels on weeknights, in a high-definition simulcast as yes Oh HD. A more detailed description records that it broadcast newer American and British TV shows from HBO, AMC, Showtime, Starz and FX at midnights, which captures the channel's late-night prestige positioning. Its sister channels were yes Action HD, yes Comedy HD, yes Drama HD and yes EDGE.

Premium Cable Programming

The programme list preserved for yes Oh shows the breadth of its premium remit. Its HBO and premium drama included Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos, Rome, True Blood, True Detective, The Newsroom, Vinyl, Luck and The Wire, together with the comedy and dramedy of Veep, Girls, Silicon Valley, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Louie. From the wider premium and basic cable world it carried Dexter, Masters of Sex and Ray Donovan, Hannibal, Da Vinci's Demons, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, Vikings, American Horror Story, The Americans, The Killing, Tyrant and Banshee.

The list continued with Downton Abbey from Britain, The Following, The Bridge, The Fall and The Knick, and with In Treatment, the American adaptation of an Israeli format, alongside Spy, Wilfred and A Young Doctor's Notebook. Taken together, the titles show a channel programmed from the top shelf of American and British series of its years: fantasy, historical drama, crime, horror and authored comedy, much of it unsuitable for earlier evening slots and therefore suited to the channel's weeknight and midnight pattern. No other channel in the yes family carried a list so concentrated in premium cable brands.

Scheduling and High Definition

yes Oh aired new episodes of its shows on weeknights, as did yes Drama and yes Action, while yes Comedy premiered at weekends. The whole of its schedule was aired in high-definition simulcast on yes Oh HD on channel 14, and the HD service aired shows in high definition at 1080i in widescreen 16:9 at all times, with programmes not shot in HD upscaled to 1080i. The standard channel aired in 576i, in 16:9 and 4:3 picture formats.

Like its sisters, the channel aired shows in four picture formats, normal 4:3, letterboxed 4:3, pan and scan 4:3 and widescreen 16:9, with three options for viewing widescreen shows on a 4:3 television, 4:3 letterbox with black bars in the original aspect ratio, 16:9 anamorphic widescreen and 4:3 pan and scan. The choice of format was made in the digital set-top box setup, and the setup did not affect shows not broadcast in widescreen. Those technical details, routine for the family, mattered for a premium channel whose audience expected the full widescreen, high-definition presentation in which its HBO series were made.

Documented Highlights: Lilyhammer and the CBS Slate

Individual acquisitions for the channel were announced in the trade press. In May 2012, yes DBS Satellite Services picked up Lilyhammer, the Norwegian-American series starring Steven Van Zandt as a New York gangster in witness protection in Lillehammer, to air on Tuesdays at 9:15pm starting 8 May 2012 on yesOh. The announcement, from distributor SevenOne International, quoted yes's senior vice president of content, Yona Wiesenthal, and noted the series' record shares on Norway's NRK1 and its sales to Netflix and the BBC. The pickup shows yes Oh's remit in action: an authored, adult drama from outside the main American networks, placed in a prime weeknight slot on the premium channel months after its launch.

The channel also sat within the platform's larger studio relationships. yes's multiyear licensing pact with CBS Studios International brought series such as Billions and Limitless, the return of Twin Peaks, Braindead and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend to yes, all also available on yesVOD and yesGo, and yes's head of acquisitions, programming and VOD described an incredible slate of new dramas and hundreds of hours of series on demand alongside the channels' line-up. Premium series of that kind were the natural stock of yes Oh and, after its cancellation, of the sister channels to which its shows were moved.

Cancellation and Legacy

yes Oh was a former channel: platform listings of the later yes line-up place yes Oh among the defunct television channels of the service, together with the older yes1 to yes5 movie channels, yes Base and the original genre channels under their first names. Reference sources record that after the cancellation of yes Oh, its shows were moved to other yes TV channels. The channel's premium function did not disappear with it; the HBO and premium catalogue remained part of the yes offer through the surviving channels and the platform's on-demand services, and the later arrival of dedicated streaming arrangements for the same studios continued the strategy yes Oh had embodied in linear form.

A summary of the family as of 5 April 2016 still listed four channels, yes Drama, yes Action, yes Oh and yes Comedy, which shows the standing yes Oh held in the system during its life: it was not a temporary experiment like Next, SCI FI or Real, but one of the four core genre channels of the platform's middle years. Its launch in January 2012 completed the genre map by separating premium cable drama from mainstream drama, and its programme list remains the clearest record of what Israeli satellite viewers understood by prestige television in that period.

yes Oh's Place in Israeli Television

For directory users, yes Oh was the premium series channel of yes, Israel's satellite provider: launched on channel 14 in January 2012 in place of yes Real, simulcast as yes Oh HD, broadcasting on weeknights the series of HBO, AMC, Showtime, Starz and FX and comparable British drama, and listed in this directory at Kfar Saba in the Central District with the platform website yes.co.il. Because the channel no longer operates, this profile is written in the past tense, and its shows are recorded as having moved to other yes channels after its cancellation.

The channel's significance lies in the moment it represents. Israeli television had spent a decade importing American series through numbered and genre channels, and yes Oh was the point at which the premium cable revolution in the United States, led by HBO, was given its own address in Israel. A subscriber looking for Game of Thrones, The Wire or True Detective knew exactly which channel embodied that taste, and that clarity of identity, even in a relatively short life, is why yes Oh retains a distinct entry in the history of the yes platform.