Amid months of speculation, FIVE has been sold to Richard Desmond's Northern & Shell for £103.5m. Previous owner RTL says the deal with the Express owner is based on a fair evaluation of the channel's worth excluding advertising revenue.

After a tough 18 months for FIVE, with advertising revenue and audience figures slowly coming out of decline, Desmond is keen to invest into TV content and expand FIVE's entertainment portfolio, with a possible interest in Big Brother when it finishes on Channel 4 this year.

TV industry sources claim that Desmond may try and transform FIVE into a UK version of E! Entertainment (in effect 'OK TV', a Northern & Shell celebrity title). However, under the terms of Five's license, the channel must screen a set amount of news and current affairs each year: regulators are keen to ensure that he doesn't intend to fill Five's schedule with 'tabloid TV.' There are many programme deals already in place (i.e the CSI franchise) which still have time left to run. In the short term, therefore, viewers will see little change to scheduling.

The Express owner is said to be worth around £950m. He amassed a large part of his fortune from pornographic magazines and Pay-TV channels and bought Express Newspapers in 2000 for £125m. It remains to be seen what he makes of Channel Five, but with a continued consolidation in the UK TV market, it was inevitable that Five would be next. There had been speculation that Channel 4 had been bidding for the channel for months, but with a much smaller offer, (rumoured to be £50m). There has been no clear date as to when Five will move over to Desmond's ownership but the channel certainly needs to be given a new lease of life to protect it's place in the UK TV market.

The end of 2010 will see the annual renegotiation of TV trading deals and so FIVE's worth to agencies moving forward will become clearer. Desmond wants to take FIVE's share of TV advertising revenue to 14% from 7%. Agencies feel this will possibly move to no more than 10% should the channel prove increasingly successfully moving forward.

It will also be interesting to see how far Desmond promotes FIVE and it's assets within his current print portfolio.