Channel Idents

1) What are they?
Channel idents are a short statement, often involving a piece of music, that tells you the name of of a radio station or television channel, which is broadcast between programmes.

Three physical characteristics that channel idents have in common are that they all:

• Display the channels logo in big bold writing
• Mostly have animations in them
• Colorful graphics and effects are used

2)A video explaining channel idents:

Whats the purpose of channel idents?
Well this is a clever way to attract an audience and make them instantly recognize that channel so without having to think about anything they will straight away be engaged in what they are watching. The main purpose is to establish and reflect the channels identity as well as the corporate identity, so for example if the content of the channel was comical they would have an ident that would be make you laugh and if their content was factual than their ident would reflect this etc. 

The design of the ident is very important as it would be something to catch an audiences eye, this is a main way a company will get across their message and purpose of their ident to the audience and will be the main representation of the companies image. Depending on the design this will reflect on how the audience will see them and can sometimes reflect on whether or not they will watch the channel. Below are two very creative and imaginative idents:

As we saw here that BBC Three has used a very distinctive way to catch their audiences eye with the use of the purple world and being turned on by the plug being inserted into the socket could indicate without power nothing would work so if the audience don't stay tuned in than they will miss the experience and what BBC Three has to show.



As we can see here this video is showing a range of ITV1's idents from 2010. They all have a common aspect to them, all very creative and unique ITV reaches out to a more maturer audience such as people in their 30's compared to an E4 ident which reaches the teenage community as it is more comedic and shows based around them for example youngers, misfits etc. Most of ITV1's idents lack bright colors you would assume that you will not see much comedies or cartoon programmes on this channel, a downside to these idents are the lack of music being played or none being played at all, this is quite dissappointing as music/soundtracks bring the ident to life and create a calm atmosphere around us. Only the narrator can be heard speaking which can be quite boring at first but with a target audience of people in their 30's not many would be seen as very interested in the music but what the narrator has to say.