[WillPS]

I cannot stress this enough. One. Step. At. A. Time. ... The time will come when we know more, but it's just a beginning. Everyone who's stating the roll-out will fail may be right, but equally, just give it time...

It's OK to speculate, opine and debate on a discussion forum. If one wants to be critical, that's fine. If someone wants to stick their neck out and predict an outcome - that's fine. Of course there's every chance one's predictions might not turn out to be correct, but that's half the fun.

So long as we're not definitively stating an opinion as a truth, I'm not sure I see the problem; nor the merit in waiting to actually see what the outcome is before declaring one's opinion on what the outcome might be.

I think it's interesting to see what people think of stuff, both in advance of important product launches (now) but also years down the line when one looks back over past innovations. Provided they stay online, discussion forums are a really rich resource in terms of understanding a snapshot of opinions which existed during a moment in time - just the other day I found myself on a Google search binge looking for information about the former Ftn channel, which then sent me down a wormhole of rediscovering the rich range of opinions which existed about Freeview in general in those early months.

None of this would be possible if everyone just obeyed a 'wait and see before opining' instruction.

There's a long way to go for Everyone TV on both Freeview, Freest and Freely, and this is ONE partnership with ONE manufacturer.

Which is a big part of the problem, from my perspective. One TV manufacturer - we don't even know how many Freely compatible models Hisense are working on. Unlike Freeview/Freesat, a somewhat walled garden which you can't just tap in to with a generic receiver. No app, no STB, nor any plans for either.

Contrast that to Freeview - who started with a captive market of up to however many subscribers ITV Digital had, with no requirement for them to change anything at all. Anyone else who saw/read/heard about the launch could walk in to their local electrical retailer and buy either an intended-for-ONdigital box, a Pace DTV Adapter or if they were really all-in an expensive IDTV; and it was clear that a plethora of other (better!) options were just around the corner, including all those categories and also DVD/HDD recorders.

Compare instead to Sky Glass - which despite a comprehensive marketing push far greater than anything we might realistically expect from Everyone TV or Hisense - is widely understood to have underperformed vs expectations. And in fairness, we knew from launch that Sky had a 'puck' product ready to go, they just made a choice to not make it available standalone straight away.

It just feels like there is lesson from history which is being missed here.