Back in 2006, Your Channels kicked off as a company focused on developing, managing, and operating ‘digital theme channels’ specifically targeted at certain audiences. Despite the company’s enthusiasm for developing these TV channels, the digital TV channels could only be broadcast on the digital cable by cable companies. Back in 2006, these companies had only a low percentage of digital cable penetration.
Despite this challenge, Your Channels developed various digital theme channels in the fields of health, culture and society, lifestyle, sports, and more. The most well-known channels were Goede Doelen TV (started in 2006 and later known as GoedTV until 2012), Golfers TV, and OUTtv (a Gay lifestyle channel that started in 2008). Many of the channels stopped in 2012, but OUTtv continued independently with support from Your Channels and its technically facilitating parent company Media Choice (which is also a shareholder).
Years later, in 2022, the idea resurfaced from the parent organization Media Choice, in collaboration with Partner in Lime owner Jefta Lentz, to develop, manage, publish and exploit audience-oriented TV channels on the recently launched Samsung TV Plus service in the Netherlands. These channels on Samsung TV Plus are offered for free with advertising support (FAST; ‘Free Ad-Supported TV’).
After the summer of 2022, Your Channels reinvented itself and focused on interesting video content (live or non-live) on the one hand, and on interesting commercial brands and audiences (viewers) who would want to see this content, first for the Dutch market. Since then, Your Channels has been working hard on new channel concepts and will soon present step by step, in collaboration with partners, an interesting channel line-up for FAST and relevant (distribution) platforms.
Your Channels was ahead of its time, so it started too early with digital theme channels in the period up to 2012. But this time it thinks it has started on time with the launch of the first FAST channels on Samsung TV Plus. Stay tuned.