A brief history of CBM.

Crown Castle fail to sell space to Turner. Boomerang, TCM and CNN running on a time shift basis won't be appearing on DTT. Crown Castle instead signs contract with the unheard of CBM. CBM promise a mixture of films, minority interest sport and other stuff. They sign contract to relay Bloomburg at breakfast.

We hear little else until Crown Castle tear up their contract with CBM and proclaim that they're looking into a way of splitting up the space between a number of broadcasters - which was a strong part of CBM's business plan.

CBM proclaim they will carry on and will look at other options, whilst moaning and griping about Crown Castle to anyone who will listen. Huge numbers of people shrug and decide that's the last we'll hear of them.

Some months on, CBM has become Freesport and announces it has signed deals with a number of sporting bodies to create a free-to-air digital channel covering those sports. The sports included are gymnastics, badminton, hockey, netball, canoeing and table tennis. Under the agreement, the sporting authorities agree to cough up cash for the channel.

Freesport proclaims the channel will hopefully broadcast on free to air on satellite, cable and DTT - claiming for the latter that "there are three or four ways to get on to Freeview, which we are currently in discussions about."

The world shrugs again, but decides it's plausible that Freesport will at least launch on satellite, maybe will launch on cable if it's very lucky, and secretly hopes it does launch on DTT so that they can find out what on earth these three or four ways to get onto the platform are. And just maybe the world of sport broadcasting will be better for it.

Reports on Media Guardian and C21Media.net.