Netgem TV Add New Games and Channels to PLEIO Freely UK Streaming TV Box
Digital entertainment platform Netgem TV has today announced that their latest UltraHD (4K) IPTV box – PLEIO, which includes support for the UK’s newest broadband-based live TV streaming service (Freely), will now return to adopting a “permanent” price of £99 and has also added new video games, as well as some extra TV channels.
“The rising cost of RAM is a significant factor for everyone in the industry, but we have made the strategic decision to absorb these costs rather than passing them on to the consumer. While the raw costs would justify a higher RRP, we have settled on a permanent price of £99 to prioritise the growth of our user base,” said a spokesperson for the company.
In addition, the company has added a number of new video games to their cloud gaming and premium TV subscription, which usually comes bundled with the PLEIO for 12-months (returns to an optional £9.99/month thereafter). On top of that they’ve also added two additional FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV) channels, including “Cosmic Frontliners” and “Magellan Wildest“.
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New PLEIO Games:
Bang-On Balls: Chronicles
DC Justice League: Cosmic Chaos
Gigantosaurus The Game
Ice Age Scrat’s Nutty Adventure
OlliOlli World
Operation: Polygon Storm
SILT
Finally, in terms of recent software (firmware) changes, the set-top-box has also added modern “picture-in-picture” functionality. The main catch in all this is that the PLEIO box is currently still listed as being out of stock on Amazon.
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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They need to sort out their PLEIO pricing after the first year. If the box is £99 with 12 months subs to PLEIO included, after the 12 months is up, they expect you to pay £9.99 per month. It would be cheaper to throw out the old box and buy a new one rather than continue paying the subs monthly.
Certainly plenty of demand for add on Freely boxes. As soon as Amazon get an allocation of the Manhattan box it sells out in a matter of hours.
Picture quality on Freely is appalling. They incorrectly encode 1080i50 into 1080p25, resulting on loss of temporal motion.
All broadcasters, bar BBC are doing this on Freely. Also Stereo sound only for all. BBC1 and BBC2 also have BBC ident on screen unlike Freeview/Freesat.
Are you watching on a Freely TV or with one of the boxes? I have the Manhattan box & I have it set to scale everything to 4K/50P and don’t get any motion artefacts. The only time I have seen any motion artefacts is if you leave the display setting on automatic and it defaults to 60Hz and you get the frequency mismatch with the source material. I personally find the picture superior to Freeview HD especially on BBC.
Netgem box at 50p for display options. The BBC deinterlace into 50 frames progressive, so correctly preserves the motion from interlaced output. ITV/CH4 and the others do equivalent of what their live streams on their catch up players do, and that is 25 frames progressive from interlaced content, thus discarding fields resulting in motion, but if you have a TV with motion interpolation it may hide it, to some degree.
On the apps side of the Netgem box, the Google TV UI runs at 60hz, but the Netgem has frame matching for content, however, only Netflix make use of the Google API call to correctly switch frame rate and a few 3rd party apps like Emby/Plex.
@FANNY ADAMS: This is how I think it works. The PSBs (BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5) shoot live content at 1080i50 for broadcast. For streaming, a conversion to progressive is mandatory: most convert to 1080p25 (it’s not ‘incorrect’ as some think, but a deliberate choice), while the BBC is the outlier, converting to 720p50. The reason for 1080p25 is that it costs much less to stream than 720p50 via CDNs (who do most of the heavy lifting). And the problem you see is just 50fps v 25fps, as at 50fps you get a new image appearing every ~20 ms but at 25fps you have to wait double the time and motion looks less smooth especially on fast-moving sports.
You may wonder why the lower 720p resolution doesn’t seem to be a problem, and the reason is that our eyes don’t capture all the missing detail in 1080p and so 720p doesn’t look obviously “low res”.
And back to costs: if it costs more to stream 720p50 than 1080p25, why does BBC do it? Part of the reason is iCDN, BBC’s internal CDN which handles 40% (and growing) of BBC’s streaming and results in lower CDN costs. Note I’m not saying that this is the main driver for using 720p’s better motion fidelity, it just makes it more affordable.
A correction to my post: for HD my belief is that although shooting used to be at 1080i50, it’s now 1080p50 with a conversion to 1080i50 for broadcast and usually either 1080p25 or 720p50 for streaming. The rest of the post is correct (E&OE).
Actually it’s filmed in 1080p25 fir most content except studios where and news where it’s 1080i.
The multiplexes have 1080i interlaced feeds (actually before it gets into that format the encoder do some clever encoding tricks to maximise the encode quality).
Those multicast feeds are used for output to various destinations. When iplayer was launched a number of tvs couldn’t handle 50 frames (ie 1080i deinterlaced) so 25p was the normal for online. When TVs advanced, the BBC caught up and changed mostly to 50 frames deinterlaced. There was a couple of exceptions, like live event sport feeds but these are now the same.
The cost if CDN is minimal, most broadcasters get hefty discounts because of volume.
The main reason why the other broadcasters are still 1080p25 (from an interlaced 1080i50 source) on Freely is because the cost of doing Freely quickly was reduced by utilising existing infrastructure used for online where they were using 1080p25 still from a 1080i50 source. In the BBCs case, they were already 50 frames and that is why you have the same generic BBC ident on Freely BBC1 and BBC2 as used on the equivalent iplayer stream and why the BBC content looks correct on Freely.
Now Freely is starting to increase in numbers, I’d hope ITV, C4,C5 etc al look to upgrading the stream used now it looks like being a proper platform and not a try it out test bed.
Every current‑generation modern professional broadcast camera (like the Sony HDC-3500/5500 or Grass Valley LDX series used by BBC, Sky, ITV, etc) have CMOS sensors which are natively progressive. Shooting news in a studio is 1080p50 although TV dramas might often be 1080p25 for dramatic effects (sorry, couldn’t help that). Sports will be 2160p50 for UHD but isn’t applicable for Freely – yet. For HD broadcasts all content must be converted to 1080i50 (or 1080i/25 depending on which naming standard you use) and for streaming it’s usually 1080p25 with BBC I believe doing 720p50 and I hear even 1080p50 sometimes. So, if dramas look good on Freely’s on-demand, thank the original capture at 1080p25.
You say the CDN cost is minimal but doubling your data (25fps to 50fps) literally doubles the data volume and so adds millions per year in delivery costs on a national scale. This ‘temporal tax’ is the main reason why almost everyone else still streams live TV with that 25fps judder which some complain about.
When Manhattan launched Aero, its Freely box, in February 2026 for £69.99, Netgem’s Pleio’s price had recently been increased to to £119.88. A £50 price difference is significant in this budget market (it’s not Pay TV after all).
Netgem has been forced to make a price correction to below the psychological barrier for hardware of £100, and the Pleio is now looking a much better deal than the Aero, whose price will actually rise by £10 to £89.99 when it becomes available for sale again in early May. That’s a mere £10 difference with Pleio having all the apps (as it’s an Android TV box) whilst Aero’s TiVo OS lacks some apps such as Apple TV+, Discovery+ and HBO Max (but I like the Aero’s Ethernet port which the Pleio lacks). In addition Pleio is of course bundled with a gamepad with a free 12-month cloud gaming subscription. So compared with the Aero, for an extra tenner you get a gamepad and every app you’d want.
And at £99 for the puck and gamepad, I think it’s quite likely that Netgem will barely break even or could lose money on every Pleio sold with the Iran war increasing the existing upward pressure on RAM and component prices. But this can be OK as a hardware loss-leader if money can be made elsewhere, such as continued access to an additional 250+ TV channels and cloud gaming for £9.99pm after a year, plus probable revenue from FAST channel advertisements.
Roger_Gooner,
After one year, you don’t have to pay anything if you dont want to play Games!
The 250+ TV channels Freely, are allways free!
=> . What happens after 12 months: You are no longer obliged to pay for the “Extra” content. The device will continue to work for free, providing access to essential Freely channels via internet.
. Optional Costs: If you wish to continue receiving 150+ extra channels and 250+ cloud games, the subscription will renew at the regular price, which is approximately £9.99/month.
. The Device Ownership: The Netgem Pleio 4K Puck and the included gamepad are yours to keep. The unit works on any TV with an HDMI port, transforming it into an Android TV device.
. Key Features Retained: You still have access to the Android TV interface, allowing you to stream apps like Prime Video or Disney+ even if you don’t renew the premium subscription.
20/04/2026
“UK e Bay is dishing out a new Sky rival that lets you stream TV for free. eBay has started selling the Freely-power PLEIO device.”