‘Jimmy’ to leave Sky Italia?

After the ditching of Studio Universal, the second run movie channel owned by NBC Universal which will end up its transmissions on Sky Italia by the end of May, another channel may lose its distribution on Italy’s digital-satellite platform.
According to several rumors the management of Sky Italia - a fully owned subsidiary of Rupert Murodch's News Corp. - has decided not to renew the distribution agreement for the entertainment channel Jimmy which might end its transmissions by the end of 2008.

That may force Italian independent TV group RSC Media to close one of the oldest thematic TV brands available in the market.

Jimmy is a general entertainment channel, with programming based mainly on TV series. It was launched in Italy in 1998 by Multithematiques, the thematic TV factory funded by the French group Canal Plus, at the time also main shareholder of Telepiù. After the merger between Telepiù and Stream that gave birth to Sky Italia, Jimmy was one of the very few channels once owned by Canal Plus to survive the new shareholder’s plans. The channel is now owned and managed by Digicast, a company owned at 51% by Milan based RCS Media Group (the owners of the main daily newspaper in Italy, Il Corriere della Sera) that also runs three other "options" channels: Caccia & Pesca (a channel dedicated to fishing and hunting), Moto TV (a channel for motorbikers) and Y&S (a channel dedicated to sailing and boats).

But according to Rapid TV News' sources Digicast might have agreed to close Jimmy (and to move its headquarters from Rome to Milan) in order to obtain another distribution agreement with Sky Italia for a proposed channel that might be based on one of RCS most important women news magazine brands.