Warning for Future UK Broadband TV Services as Freely Suffers Big Outage

The UK government’s proposed plan to switch-off Digital Terrestrial TV (DTT) signals in either 2034 or 2044 as part of a wider change to move toward broadband-based TV streaming (here), such as via the new Freely service, arguably suffered a bit of a reality check last week after that very same service experienced a major outage.

Broadband-based live TV streaming service Freely, which is backed by the major UK broadcasters, is currently said to be an evolution – not yet a replacement – for the existing Freeview platform (inc. Freeview Play and Freesat). But many people do expect this platform, which already has 1 million users, to ultimately play a key role in taking over from DTT signals. The new platform is forecast to be in 10.5 million UK households by 2034, which would overtake Freeview (here).

However, if you were using Freely last week, specifically between Thursday afternoon and Friday evening, then you might have been left a bit confused by what happened and could even still be struggling to recover today. The service appeared to suffer a major outage, which for some users knocked out access to almost all of its channels, except those of the BBC (we don’t know why).

Users experiencing this issue found themselves being faced with black screens on the impacted channels and an ETV6056 error code, which was followed by a rather generic message.

Freely’s Initial Status Update (Thursday 13th Aug 2026)

We are aware that some viewers are currently experiencing disruption to their viewing and may be seeing the ETV6056 error code. Our team is continuing to actively investigate the issue and working with our partners to restore service as quickly as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Anybody who went Googling that error code may well have found themselves on the relevant Service Status Announcement (note to Freely: it would be helpful to have a general Service Status page for all such issues), which went through a few changes – initially telling everybody to sit tight. But it was later updated to recommend that those “still experiencing the problem … may need to carry out a factory reset on your device” in order to recover the channels (i.e. the underlying problem was fixed, but not for everyone).

The same page warned that “carrying out a factory reset will delete all data from your TV or Streaming Device. This will include any recordings, login info, and any settings you had saved“, which is of course what usually happens when you do a factory reset on any device. But this is a distinctly more complex, annoying and undesirable approach, especially for pensioners and those with key disabilities, than Freeview’s relative linear simplicity. We can easily imagine some people being stuck with Freely kit and never knowing how to get the lost channels back.

Ideally nobody should have to do a factory reset just to be able to recover the channels that went offline in an outage, they should just come back once that problem is resolved. Clearly Freely has some work to do on either the software or hardware design front in order to avoid this kind of situation reoccurring again in the future.

Just to add to all this “fun“. The fix that Freely applied is not yet said to be permanent, with the company warning that the “problem may occur again” after the factory reset if you either press ‘Restart‘ on a channel or use a player app (ITVX, My5 and so on). So watching live channels from the TV guide should work normally, but leave those apps you love well alone.. for now. Again, not ideal.

At the time of writing, it’s not known if all Freely supported devices were impacted or only certain kit, although we know that both Netgem’s PLEIO and Manhattan’s Aero 4K TV boxes were both impacted as they confirmed as much. Lest we forget that a lot of other Freely supporting TV’s and some boxes do have aerial / Freeview connectivity as a fallback (until it’s switched off), but neither of those two boxes above do as they’re broadband-only.

In fairness, even digital terrestrial TV services do sometimes suffer partial outages too, most of which occur due to changes in the atmosphere / weather. But there can also be more localised outages too at specific sites from time to time. Suffice to say, no system is perfect, but Freely does need to consider reliability with greater priority if this is to become the nation’s default in the future.