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The channel was launched in 2006 as Five Life, the free-to-air channel with programming orientated towards women mostly, which means that the channel broadcasts drama, comedies, and thematic reality shows, e.g., medical shows and professional cleaning shows.

The channel was rebranded several times, from Five Life to Fiver to 5STAR; however, the key concept is the number 5 in different representations. This numeral refers to the channel owner, Channel 5 Broadcasting Limited.

When the channel was launched, the premiere content included the sophisticated The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Angela’s Eyes crime series, Windfall, and the show of Trisha Goddard. Yet immediately after the launch, the channel moved into the realm of dramas for female audiences and started showing new productions and popular series repeats in large amounts.

When 5STAR airs documentaries, it often shares them with its parent Channel 5. Hence, sometimes it can be confusing to the audience, since they can be tuning in to a rerun of the documentary they‘ve already seen before.

The most watched show on the channel is Big Brother: Life from the House. It attracted around 1 million viewers and a significant audience share tuning in during the broadcasting hour.

The channel strives to maintain its image of a fun, youthful and fast-paced channel that keeps up with the trends. To give it more of a glitzy tabloid image, the channel got a new logo in 2011, a big number 5 and a star enclosed into two pink bubbles.

In line with its image of a female-skewed and youth-targeting channel, 5STAR periodically drops general comedy shows and dramas from the schedule and fills the air with shows that reflect the presumed audience interests: medical shows like Skin A&E, reality TV shows, cleanup and child-rearing shows (like Filthy House SOS and Rich Kids Go Skint).

5STAR offers a selection of films shown during the appointed weekly slots, like romcoms at lunchtime, or crime dramas in the evenings, but the quality of offered films is sometimes very questionable. It is actually so questionable that Kermode and Mayo's Film Review on BBC Radio 5 Live often includes the films shown on 5STAR into their list of exceptionally bad TV movies.

The channel airs both original British content and content purchased from the USA and Australia. The shows, soap operas and dramas are selected for purchase according to their domestic popularity in terms of number of views and alignment with the intended audience of 5STAR.

Initially, 5STAR had its time-shift version, 5STAR +1, but it was axed in February of 2014. In September, 2014, the time-shift channel was returned to a slot on Freesat. It was simultaneously launched in Ireland, but the time-shift service for Ireland was a mistake, so it was removed from the air there for good.