[interestednovice]

I see your point.

To be honest, the almost inevitability of this happening is what has kept me from upgrading my own TV. I live in a “full Freeview” (6 muxes plus local mux) area and have a great TV but it’s old now. It’s a plasma 1080p screen, so not 4K, and no smart features - but it has amazing colours and built-in Freeview HD. I was very careful to buy a T2 tuner model right at the beginning, so got the TV in 2010. But I would like a smart TV. However, I’ve been waiting for the next proper future-proof upgrade.

The proper upgrade being Freeview over the internet - with more channels in HD, and smart features integrated into the EPG, etc, rather than merely as apps - is what is coming with Freely.

So my next TV will probably be a Freely 4K model, probably also a bit larger than the current one. But for normal TV viewing in the meantime, I am just supplementing the “dumb” TV with set top boxes.

There is no reason Freely couldn’t exist as an app too but it would be a big like running a virtual machine on a PC - an EPG within an app, different from the normal EPG, etc.

Maybe they’ve decided that would be too complicated and result in customer confusion.