Freely’s UK Broadband TV Streaming Service Adds More Channels
Broadband-based live TV streaming service Freely, which is supported by most of the major UK TV broadcasters (BBC, ITV etc.) and is an evolution – not (yet) a replacement – for the existing Freeview service (inc. Freeview Play and Freesat), has said they’re adding another 7 channels to the free platform via partnerships with Warner Bros. Discovery UK & Ireland and CNN.
The first of these channels, CNN Headlines (channel 305), has already gone live and will be followed in early 2026 by Quest, Quest Red, Food Network, DMAX, Really and TLC – which moves to free-to-air in January 2026. The new additions mean Freely will carry over 70 live channels via Wi-Fi, alongside more than 75,000 hours of on demand content. Further expansion is currently being planned for 2026.
Freely is currently available on new smart TVs from manufacturers including Hisense, Bush, Toshiba, Panasonic, JVC, Sharp, TCL, Amazon Fire TVs and METZ. Most recently these have also been joined by some “Plug-in and stream” devices, such as a new box from Humax and PLEIO from Netgem TV.
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Deep Halder, CCO of Everyone TV, said:
“These additional channels have so much to offer the Freely audience, further expanding the line-up for UK homes who are increasingly choosing to stream live TV. From global news delivered by CNN to the extensive portfolio of entertainment shows from Warner Bros. Discovery, who recently announced some exciting linear-first commissions of fan favourites including a new-look Mock the Week coming to TLC next year. Viewers will be able to easily and seamlessly access these brand-new shows, all in one place, for free, on Freely.”
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Still needs to be a standalone app for Google/Apple/Fire TV.
I suspect they think they are being smart and restricting to the geographic UK by limiting to TVs and STBs.
I suspect it will be a while, if ever before that happens.
Because nobody has a clue how to vpn an STB…
@GG
Even with apps they can be a PITA e.g. BBC iPlayer on Android/Google TV, to the point that I can no longer (officially) watch the iPlayer on my Shield TV because the BBC made app doesn’t work and the Nvidia app won’t launch.
I suspect they just prefer to keep things locked down and only on licensed/certified/’gimme money’ devices.
This isn’t exclusive to Freely, I always thought it was annoying I had to use a Sky Q mini box instead of an app.
The main issue I have with new Netgem Freely box, is that ITV/C4/C5 and others try and deinterlace pictures to 25p resulting in a horrible picture of motion judder because of the loss of temporal motion.
Only the BBC correctly deinterlaces, BUT because Freely was quickly introduced, they simply use a feed used for iPlayer, and this means it has a BBC ident on BBC1 and BBC2 which Freeview and Freesat does not.
I have no doubt that the Freely box is ingesting most of the non-BBC content from CDNs as 1080i, and is also deinterlacing and upscaling to 2160p50 for UHD TVs. Why 1080I? Because most broadcasters are still stuck in legacy broadcast mode and haven’t upgraded to stream at 1080p. But, I hear you say, 1080i looks good on my UHD TV. It does because TVs and STBs have hardware deinterlacers and scalers whilst Pleio, a little IP-only device, does not. The only real solution is for the channels to stream at 1080p50.
Back to BBC: it outputs at 1080p50 or 720p50, so the box doesn’t have to do that awkward deinterlacing and the pictures look better.