More and more Australian homes are shunning free-to-air TV, which is understandable considering the drivel pumped out by the commercial networks and their general contempt for viewers. Even so broadcast television is still a mainstay in many lounge rooms, with FreeviewPlus making it easier to find those hidden gems.
Its streaming video service has undergone a Netflix-style makeover, making it easier to find something decent to watch on free-to-air television. Here are our first impressions.
The cross-network streaming service got off to a slow start but FreeviewPlus is gradually finding its way into more lounge rooms, built into a growing number of HbbTV-compatible Smart TVs along with the AerialBox T2200 PVR.
If your television is only a few years old then chances are it supports FreeviewPlus, pressing the green button on your remote to call up the Freeview onscreen Electronic Program Guide (EPG) or the red button to launch the Catch Up apps from the various broadcasters.
More than skin deep
The latest revamp is available on all FreeviewPlus-compatible devices, it should appear automatically and you don’t need to run a software update. At first it looks like simply a cosmetic makeover, launching a new slick-looking interface when you press the green button, but it’s worth digging a little deeper.
For starters, the new layout does a better job of using the available screen real estate. It also draws more attention to Freeview’s handy “reverse EPG”, which lets you scroll back through time through the EPG in search of Catch Up TV for shows you’ve missed, rather than diving into the individual Catch Up apps.
The new look comes as Freeview also revamps its Freeview FV mobile app to support Chromecast streaming. Sometimes it’s easier to find what you want on your smartphone and then fling it to your television, rather than navigating through a Smart TV interface, but the new-look FreeviewPlus app on televisions has a few tricks up its sleeve.
My TV
The biggest change to the FreeviewPlus home screen is easy access to the new My TV menu – a Netflix-style dashboard which mixes live TV and Catch Up TV from all the broadcasters so it’s easier to wade through the rubbish and find something worth watching.
The green-button FreeviewPlus app has always aimed to be more than just an onscreen TV guide and Catch Up TV aggregator, and My TV helps it deliver on that promise. It’s now a TV guide in the true sense of the word, blending live and Catch Up TV whilst making suggestions based on your viewing habits.
From within the FreeviewPlus app you press the yellow button to launch My TV, whereas before yellow was the Menu button offering separate categories like Catch Up, Feature and Favourites. The new My TV menu combines all this into a slick dashboard which gives you an overview of all your viewing options at a glance.
My TV shows you what’s on TV right now, with the ability to surf across the entire EPG. Below this are your favourites where you can bookmark individual shows, such as Doctor Who. Click on a favourite and in one screen you can see upcoming episodes, set reminders, view Catch Up options and see similar upcoming TV shows and movies that you might enjoy.
Below Favourites, the My TV menu lists Recommended For You, Catch Up and Our Picks, after which it breaks content down into categories such as News, Sport, Drama, Movies, Documentaries and Children’s.
Easier to use
To be fair these options were previously buried away in sub-menus, but My TV puts them all at your fingertips. The new interface is also better at highlighting and explaining the advanced features like favourites and reminders, which means viewers are more likely to use them and in turn My TV will become even more useful.
Admittedly it’s hard to get too excited about free-to-air television these days, but the new-look FreeviewPlus makes it easier to find the cream of the crop. If you’ve never bothered with the green button Freeview EPG on your television, it’s worth taking a look.
What do you watch on free-to-air television and what do you want from an onscreen guide?
This article originally appeared in Digital Life, The Sydney Morning Herald’s home for everything technology. Follow Digital Life on Facebook and Twitter.
Comments
4 responses to “You Need To Try Freeview’s New Netflix-Style Catch Up TV App”
If you’re going to compare this against Netflix, then does it have that service’s biggest appeal – no adverts when watching on-demand content? My suspicion is no, as FV is owned by the commercials.
Even with an improved delivery method, the other question is whether there’s much content on there worth watching. We only use FTA for the news, as the remaining programming seems to be mostly homogeneous, disposable “reality” shows.
I tried to use the Freeview FV app yesterday and it was a pain. I just wanted to catch up on a channel nine show, opened Freeview, found the show, clicked Chromecast then the play option, it made me download the 9Now app and use that app instead. So it made having Freeview app pointless for me. You can watch live tv through the app but why would I do that if I have a TV at home, I don’t think I’m the right target market for this app.
I think this is about the software on some TV and set top boxes. Not an app in the way we all interpret it as for your phone or tablet.
So that Freeview TV App on your phone is different from this. I’ve seen a few near identical articles on this (press releases anyone?) and if you glance you just see “new Freeview App,” “Catch up” and “like Netflix.” So you immediately think it refers to an android and IOS app for catch up.
Nope this is nothing like the sort. That said, all the network catch up services as are decent now and it’s worth having the apps on your phone. Except for TEN which is the only one lacking Chromecast. Although one pet peeve is that if you fast forward shows, they often make you watch all the ad breaks in a row.
At the end of the day, their FTA content is trash, what is actually good is generally significantly late to market, and there’s advertising throughout all of it… I’ll pass.
Freeview Plus has always been, and still is, a complete and utter waste of time. Difficult to navigate, slow, unreliable, lacks content (yes, really – more content available on dedicated apps), and generally leads me to start swearing at the TV. Don’t get me wrong, I want it to be good, but it aint – words cannot describe how dreadful I think it is. What works a million times better is firing up the PS4 and using the individual apps on that. What I find annoying is the amount of cash that is pumped into promoting it, that would be more wisely spent on making it work properly.