Altnet Broadband ISP Connect Fibre Launch Netgem’s New PLEIO UK TV Box
Alternative broadband operator and UK ISP Connect Fibre, which has been rolling out their gigabit-capable full fibre (FTTP) network across the East of England, have today become the latest internet provider to make Netgem TV‘s new PLEIO IPTV set-top-box and streaming service available via their TV bundles. The new kit is both more powerful and supports the new Freely live TV streaming service.
As with the prior announcement from Brsk, this news won’t come as much of a surprise because Netgem TV already revealed that Connect Fibre would be one of the first ISPs to adopt PLEIO as part of last week’s launch (here). But at the time, the ISP hadn’t yet made the new hardware and service available to their customers, which changes today.
Connect Fibre TV, powered by Netgem PLEIO, will be available for £10 per month – and included within a range of value-packed broadband bundles. Alternatively, anybody can buy PLEIO at retail via Amazon for £99, but this doesn’t include their optional service subscription for premium channels and games (an extra £9.99 monthly if you buy the hardware at retail). The catch is that, due to high demand, the new box is currently out of stock via Amazon.
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Stefan Stanislawski, CEO of Connect Fibre, said:
“We’re thrilled to join forces with Netgem to offer PLEIO and deliver a complete ‘all things streaming’ promise to our Fibre Broadband customers. We are particularly excited to offer for the first time access to all broadcasters channels alongside streaming apps to the younger segments that also enjoy watching our great British shows on national television, live or catch-up. Connect Fibre TV means complete entertainment, and with our ultrafast Fibre Broadband coupled with our recently launched Wi-Fi 7 routers, our customers can enjoy the best entertainment experience for a fraction of the price of the main Pay-TV providers.”
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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Its a nippy little box. Has addons like Emby and Plex and Apple TV/Paramount/Disney etc.
Much faster at running apps than current generation of high end LG TV’s like G5.
Also, once you enable Frame rate match in the menus, Netflix and Emby play at correct frame rates without judder. It supports the “Seamless” switching as well.
Some things I don’t like are non-ability to disable Freely apps I am not interested in like GBNews, S4C, STV Player, inability to renumber channels to your own preference, and the fact that some broadcasters are encoding their output for Freely incorrectly like 1080i to 1080p25 which causes motion judder due to temporal loss. Also the BBC is stupidly carrying the iPlayer feed for BBC1 and BBC2 so has the “BBC” ident on the channels whereas Satellite and Aerial distribution doesn’t have the on screen ident. They tried this stunt with launch of digital on satellite then had to take it off due to viewer complaints. Also a weird thing of ITVx, channel 4, channel 5, U can exist under Freely apps section, and your own apps downloaded from Google Play Store, so you have to remove them if it put them there during setup phase (it looks at your Google account to see what apps you installed on other devices before as part of setup).
Not sure what the difference is in having a box that is faster than your TV with Apps? My Hisense Roku TV takes 14 seconds from button press to when prime is ready to use and most of that is animation prime does, ITVx is 10 seconds, again, most is the animation on start up. Are you in that much of a rush to watch something?
Freely is a different system to Freeview, while you can renumber and get rid of channels in Freeview, I will be surprised if it happens in Freely, but it may do.
Freely is still in early days, they will sort out problems, maybe.
Freely is supposed to be the replacement for Freeview, which is why Everyone TV did not want it as a separate box originally, but it seems like only the cheap manufactures are going for it, Hisense, TCL and Vestel. Sony and Samsung don’t seem interested in Freely at the moment.
I still see little point in it at the moment unless you want to watch normal TV where there is no aerial. If I watched normal TV, I doubt I would bother with Freely, even if it was on my TV.
Got Roku, got Fire stick – dislike both.
Freely is great where you don’t want coaxial cables to run or aerials to put up.
Sony, Samsung and LG currently not interested because they have their own Channels equivalent – I have it on the LG G5, but its a mess quite frankly. Awful encoded pictures that haven’t been deinterlaced properly, or just passed as original interlaced format in most cases and a guide that has random numbers and channels thrown around.
As Freely adds more and more channels, LG, Samsung and Sony will change their tune.