'The Studio' to close

In an unsurprising move today, The Studio movie channel announced it will be closing down before the end of the year. The channel, a joint-venture between cash-strapped companies Vivendi Universal and ntl, was only available on ntl:home's digital cable service and thus failed to gain wider recognition that carriage on Telewest and/or Sky would have brought.

The Media Guardian reports that the decision to close the channel was taken after both companies involved in the joint venture decided it wasn't financially viable. Given Vivendi's decision today to sell its stake in US DTH satellite provider EchoStar, it doesn't come as a huge shock that the media company would want to tighten the purse-strings further on smaller ventures such as The Studio.