Discovery Real Time


Discovery Real Time was a factual television channel owned by Discovery Networks Western Europe.

Overview

It was originally launched in the UK in March 1992 as TLC, a British version of the US channel of the same name. It was initially broadcast as a daytime channel from Intelsat, mostly aimed at cable systems where it would broadcast on the Discovery Channel's frequency.
When the Discovery Channel launched on Astra in July 1993, it didn't initially carry TLC in the daytime. From 1994, it shared a transponder on the Astra 1C satellite with the Discovery Channel, which started its broadcasts at 4pm.
It was later rebranded as Discovery Home & Leisure in April 1997.
Full day broadcasting started with the launch of Sky Digital in 1998. In May 2001, a timeshift channel called Discovery Home & Leisure +1 was launched.
From 1997 to 2002, the logo was a blue oblong containing a window, however this was changed to a red background featuring a stylised 'H&L', staying like this until 2005.
The channel was relaunched as Discovery Real Time on 7 May 2005 in the UK market. The channel aimed at complementing the female-skewed Discovery Home & Health.
A sister channel called Discovery Real Time Extra was launched on 22 August 2005. On 20 March 2009, it was replaced with Discovery Shed.
Discovery Real Time is also available in some other regions, including France and Italy. The channel used to be available in Asia, but since October 2008, it has become the Asian version of Discovery Turbo.
The channel closed along with Discovery Travel & Living at 6am on 30 April 2013, to be replaced by TLC and Investigation Discovery +1. The last program on Discovery Real Time was, fittingly, The Joy of Painting, one of Real Time's signature programs. Given that TLC is chasing a completely different demographic than the old TLC, Discovery is treating it as a new channel launch rather than a return.
On 15 April 2019, an African version named StarTimes Real Time was launched exclusively on StarTimes.

Programming