Who remembers Sumo TV? Let’s take a look back at Cellcast’s free-to-air television babe channel that first launched on 28th November 2006. Sumo TV was the UK’s first user generated content TV channel but it also had operations in America, Asia, India, Europe and the Middle East, with a showcase of local content. Think of it like YouTube but smaller. Every time a clip was broadcast, the original creator of the video received a percentage of the revenue generated, hence encouraging more and more creators to upload their content.
Although Sumo TV was an extremely popular concept and loved by viewers, the babe channel pre-cursor was often criticised by media governing body, Ofcom, for putting too much trust in the content creator for complying with the broadcasting code of user-generated clips rather than Sumo TV performing all the checks themselves. Lesson learned.
In 2007, Sumo TV hired Loaded magazine’s, James Brown as the channel’s creative and editorial director. Brown introduced a dozen new programmes which proved to be a slightly over ambitious move. In March 2008, it was announced that Cellcast had sold Sumo TV and Sumo TV +1’s EPG slots to Discovery for £1.4m. However, Cellcast received another slot further down the Entertainment category of the EPG. In November 2008, Sumo TV was moved to the Adult category which allowed them to broadcast XXX nude / topless content from Cellcast’s adult phone chat babe channels at night.
Several weeks after moving to the adult category, Sumo TV returned to the Entertainment category with Psychic TV. This went on for four years until Sumo TV closed broadcasting for good in August 2012. It was replaced with a simulcast of the Horror Channel. Psychic TV is still going strong today and we are certainly incredibly grateful for the content creators of Babestation who keep us satisfied 24/7 with their X-rated pictures & videos, solo babecall cam shows, Pervcam feeds, JOI cheap phone sex and live porn shows.
