Cloo

Cloo, formerly known as Sleuth, was an American pay television channel owned and operated by NBCUniversal which aired programming originally dedicated to the crime and mystery genres, though in its later years it occasionally aired series and films unrelated to these genres, and was used as an example of channel drift and superfluous channel bundling, presenting series easily found through other venues. The channel launched on January 1, 2006, replacing Trio, and closed on February 1, 2017. , approximately 25,495,000 American households (21.9% of households with television) received Cloo, though this declined with later removals by several cable services as carriage agreements expired.

Cloo, formerly known as Sleuth, was an American pay television channel owned and operated by NBCUniversal which aired programming originally dedicated to the crime and mystery genres, though in its later years it occasionally aired series and films unrelated to these genres, and was used as an example of channel drift and superfluous channel bundling, presenting series easily found through other venues. The channel launched on January 1, 2006, replacing Trio, and closed on February 1, 2017. , approximately 25,495,000 American households (21.9% of households with television) received Cloo, though this declined with later removals by several cable services as carriage agreements expired. ==History== Cloo focused on mystery entertainment, with the majority of the channel's programming sourced from fellow Comcast networks such as NBC and USA Network. By 2016, the network's schedule was made up mostly of repeats of USA Network series, and marathons of acquired series from the Law and Order, NCIS, and CSI franchises, along with the original MacGyver and House. Films from the NBCUniversal library or acquired as part of USA Network's film rights purchases were also part of the schedule, meaning films having nothing to do with crimes or mysteries, such as Enchanted, The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Bee Movie aired on the network. On August 15, 2011, Sleuth was renamed as Cloo in order for NBCU to be able to trademark and own the name, as the word "clue" itself is too common a name to be trademark-able and the commonness of both "sleuth" and "clue" would not work for search engine optimization. In addition, the different spelling averted any confusion with Hasbro's board game Clue. ===Carriage decline and closure=== On August 10, 2013, Cloo was removed by Dish Network, which cited that most of the network's rerun-centric programming was duplicative of that available on other networks and streaming services. A year later on August 18, 2014, it was removed from Verizon FIOS for the same reason. Charter Communications (Spectrum, Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable) removed the channel with its services in January 2017, as with Esquire Network (another Comcast/NBCU network which was closed on June 28, 2017), when it refused to continue their carriage of Cloo within their new carriage agreements with NBCUniversal, removing around 2/3 of the network's homes and reducing to 8.5 million households. NBCU already had been looking to remove extraneous channels without original programming since the summer of 2016, criteria which Cloo, Chiller, and Esquire fell into. In the end, however, industry media had little to no notice of the closure, and only cable providers learned of its closure in advance on January 31 as of 5:59 a.m. ET from Comcast, due to the limited amount of time between Charter's settlement of their new NBCUniversal carriage agreement and the channel's sudden closure. Because the channel was effectively automated with little to no promotions to maintain, no employees were affected by the channel's closure. On February 1, 2017, its social media presences were removed, and the website redirected to the USA Network site without any notice. The network's last broadcast day consisted of a full-series marathon of Syfy's Continuum. Following the end credits of the last episode, a slide was shown, with the Cloo logo and the words "GOOD NIGHT!" underneath, along with "Thank you for watching Cloo", the NBCUniversal logo, and the name of the satellite that provided Cloo's broadcast (AMC 10, Transponder 7) in between two NBC logos, along with the common NBC off-air audio test using the network's trademark chimes. Shortly after Cloo's shutdown, NBCUniversal announced that the female-focused network Oxygen would be refocused as a true crime channel to fill a void left by Cloo's closure, which occurred several months later.

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