run rights to archive drama being sought after for the new channel. ITV was also negotiating with Sky over carriage of ITV3, eventually reaching an impasse due to the lack of EPG space on some Sky Digiboxes. It was later announced with carriage on Freeview, NTL and Telewest, but with no Sky carriage. Many had expected GSkyB to either be sold or closed entirely, an option ITV considered as it began the sale of non-core assets. 2004–present: ITV plc control and multichannel expansion On 1 November 2004, ITV plc agreed to purchase BSkyB's stake in GSkyB for £10 million. The deal included the slot that Granada Plus was broadcasting on, which ITV used to broadcast its new ITV3 channel which replaced Plus on the same day. The negotiations that led to ITV plc taking sole control of GSkyB, closing Plus and launching ITV3 on digital satellite were apparently completed just hours before the new channel started broadcasting. On 8 November, Granada Sky Broadcasting was renamed ITV Digital Channels Limited, shortly after the closure of Granada Plus left Men & Motors as the sole survivor of the original four channels. As part of ITV's buy-out of Sky's shareholding, Sky would have received 49.5% of any proceeds (net of liabilities) from any future sale of Men & Motors. The newly renamed company was given the brief of running all of ITV's digital services, with the major difference from the former GSkyB operation being that its channels were now free-to-air and carried the ITV brand. On 2 May 2005, Men & Motors launched as a free-to-air channel on the Freeview digital terrestrial television service. It was rumoured that ITV plc would replace it with ITV4, another men's channel, when it launched later that year on 1 November, echoing the launch of ITV3 in 2004. However, after better than expected performance from Men & Motors as a free-to-air channel, both channels continued and ITV plc cut the hours of the ITV News Channel to make way for ITV4 and CITV instead. The news channel closed on 23 December of that year with its remaining bandwidth used for CITV. Although ITV4 started broadcasting from the Astra satellite on 1 November, it was not placed on the Sky EPG until 7 November. Because of this, some ITV4 sports programming was simulcast on Men & Motors under the ITV4 on m&m strand. On 23 February 2006, despite