‘BUBBLE’ BURSTS FOR TV MUSIC CHANNEL

Bubble Hits, the music television channel founded by Mitchelstown entrepreneur James Hyland has gone off air, writes Joe Leogue.

The channel and its website were pulled last weekend, with Hyland and business partner Lee Walsh citing falling advertising revenue as the reason to end the channel’s two year run.

The Irish owned music channel last year launched on every digital service in Ireland including NTL, Chorus, Magnet Entertainment and Smart Vision and claimed to have over 20 million viewers per month.

A separate Bubble Hits Ireland channel was also launched last year, promising a platform for Irish bands and artistes to showcase their music.

Bubble Hits was set up to contrast with other music channels such as MTV and their reality TV-oriented programming, and its innovative scheduling of advertising, airing six 60 second adverts per hour as opposed to other channels’ 13 minutes of ads across 4 breaks per hour, meant that viewers were promised that they were ‘never more than 60 seconds away from the next song’.

Hosts on Bubble Hits included X-Factor judge and pop manager Louis Walsh, model Glenda Gilson and Liam McKenna, formerly of pop group Six.

Mr Hyland is now expected to focus his attention on his audio production company Pro Audio Images, which caters for commercials, voice-overs and audio production.

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