Monday 16th January 2006 saw the biggest rebrand in UK television history. On this date the ITV network rebranded all of its channels to give them a uniform look and essentially be a "family of channels". This meant UTV had to either change its image to blend in or risk having a mish-mash of on-screen presentation. Much to our delight, UTV launched the first of their new idents at 9:25am, carrying on the look from their new programme promotion graphics. The idents carried the same yellow bars (a la ITV1) with their trademark scenery shots making a reappearance in the middle. The UTV logo moved to the right hand side, albeit with the V being chopped off on 4:3 TVs! This was later corrected though, with everything being shifted slightly to the left.

Not only did UTV treat us to a new set of idents but they also tweaked the music which they had only been using for little over 2 months! The UTV jingle now has a strong whooshing sound at the start followed by a much more up-tempo version of the soundtrack.

On 1st February 2006, the location names were added to the top of all idents. The old versions with no names were no longer used from this date forward.

In March 2006, seven new idents were added to the set, all of which were filmed in Belfast. These included shots of the River Lagan and Belfast Lough, as well as Giant's Ring and Belfast City Hall. Some special idents were also aired, starting with one for St Patrick's Day on 17th March. Another special ident was used in the run up to the North West 200.

In August 2006, a further three new idents were added to the set, two featuring the Craigmore Viaduct in County Armagh and the other featuring the Old Town Dock in Warrenpoint. Four special idents were also in use during the summer in June 2006 to celebrate UTV's involvement in the 2006 Special Olympics Ireland Games.

November 2006 saw more additions to the UTV ident set. Ten more scenery idents, filmed in Counties Down and Armagh were added to the ten or so already in circulation. These additions featured places such as Hillsborough Lake, Lurgan Park and the Dromara Hills.

On Sunday 8th July 2007, this set of idents were finally laid to rest, 18 months after their introduction in January 2006. They were replaced with a new set of scenery idents using the same template but with new overhead scenes filmed from a helicopter for the series Ultimate Ulster which aired in summer 2007. The new idents were also complete with UTV's new tagline: It's all about U. They can be seen here.

For ease of use, this section has now been split up into different categories which can be accessed from the previous menu. The recent additions to the set are now on a page of their own, as are the original line-up of idents and the special idents. I have also added a page which includes the exact idents in the order in which they were aired on the day of UTV's relaunch. The last page in this section is a number of mock designs done by me, showing locations which I would like to see UTV use in future idents.

Enjoy!