DISCOVERY - UK Ownership

In the UK Ownership seems to be a Corporate Maze - try and navigate through this to see who actually 'owns' the Channel !! .... .... I've left a lot of text there because it's curious to see the tangled web of ownership behind the TV Companies.......

UK Gold is Britain's most successful satellite channel outside BSkyB. Stakes held by BBC and Telecommunications Inc (TCI). TCI is a US corporation whose subsidiary in Britain is Flextech, which owns The Family Channel, Playboy, Bravo, Discovery and The Sega Channel and has a 20% holding in Scottish TV; TCI, through its UK subsidiary Tinta, also is part-owner of TeleWest, the UK's largest cable operator. (An interesting recent development (early 1999), which highlights the extraordinary complexity of the global media, is Murdoch's move to full ownership of Fox/Liberty, buying out John Maolne's US-based Liberty Media. Liberty Media own a controlling share in Flextech, which probably means that we will see a close co-operation between BSkyB and Flextech's UK-based pay-TV operation in the near future.) In addition, TCI owns the largest cable operation in the US (but is nevertheless also behind two US satellite systems), has a presence in eighteen countries (including France's Canal+) and interests in more than a hundred programme outlets, including Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting Sytems and many Japanese outlets. TCI is also a major investor in Bill Gates's Microsoft Network. Not unlike Murdoch's UK-based News International, TCI (run by John Malone) has never shown a profit (and therefore not paid taxes). As an example of the complexity of media ownership, consider the Federal Trade Commission's permission for the merger of Turner Broadcasting Systems and Time-Warner: the FTC had concerns about the monopoly implications of the deal as TCI owns 7.5% of Time-Warner and 22% of Turner. As Time-Warner and Turner account for around 50% of US cable subscribers, the FTC required TCI to transfer its shares in Time-Warner to another company spun off from TCI's control and also to require some cable systems to carry another news service in addition to CNN.

http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/mediaown.html

So the Answer is Flextech - a Subsidiary of the American Company TCI.

Congrats if you managed to read all of the above !!