Looks great, but so far it seems to be just available on new TVs from Hisense. I guess this is because it has fairly large storage requirements in order to let you pause live tv.
I assume at some point it can be made available as an app if you have enough accessible hard drive space, I’m thinking it’ll be doable with my Nvidia shield but probably not tomorrow. Would be cool to get this running without buying a new TV.
I was a bit surprised the service launched with no web or app support at all, even if with limited functionality.
Freely seems to be aiming for quick adoption from what I’ve read, the aim is to have it replace broadcast Freeview entirely. Most people don’t buy new TVs very often, but many would likely start/try using Freely if they could access it on devices they already have.
I guess the problem would be that a fire stick/Google TV/other TV dongle just doesn’t have the compute and or storage to do this stuff. Maybe apple TV would be ready to be fair. Certainly no Samsung/LG inbuilt stuff will manage it.
Maybe this and other things like it in other countries will spur on a new category of dongle devices that come with like 500GB or more storage that will enable people to keep their current TVs.
Maybe they could offer a version of the software that comes without the ability to pause live TV, I think that’s what would be required to make it work with existing hardware
I have two Rasp Pi Zero’s stuck behind my TV that cost me £10+£10 DVB HAT’s x 2 (before the COVID scalpers took effect) as a poor mans Homerun server that have plenty of storage - be that a new USB drive stuck in them or even using my NAS with NFS for storage.
Device cost/viability isn’t a thing here.
It’s getting people signing up to a service that’ll be plastered with adverts every 15 mins? I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.
They’ll take my TVHeadend servers out of my cold dead hands if they think I’m signing up for that?
I dislike this push to move all of media to the internet. Just look at what’s happened to print journalism once the managers decided to cut costs and move online. Now most of it is clickbait for ad revenue. Indeed, print subscriptions have been making a comeback recently because at least in print there are standards.
Plus there’s the security concern of putting every craptacular TV on the internet and we’re one shitty company giving all their displays the same default password away from a massive bitnet sending a million Viagra emails a second, or worse, hosting ransomware.
In the future I hope for a separate system from internet protocol that can handle free to view TV. Something that is receive-only like current TV ariels and GPS. Virgin already does this with their one fibre line to the home carrying both their TV service and a separate internet connection. You can get one, the other, or both over that same line. With the rollout of fibre across the country I hope this becomes the chosen solution for people to be able to plug their TV into the line to pick up the free channels without having to pay for internet service if they don’t want that (remember that a lot of people’s internet connection is their phone).
