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The Fox Report Barry Fox’s technology column The UK’s TV Future: Linear, Digital or Just Confused? T his year’s DTG (Digital Television Group) Summit was billed as “TV: The Bigger Picture 2025, a pivotal gathering at a defining moment for our industry.” To talk about the future of TV, we first need to learn a whole new language. “Generation Z” includes anyone born between 1997 and 2012. Gen Z grew up accessing the internet and using smartphones. They are used to being able to access content of all kinds – information, music, podcasts, news and opinion, how-to-do-things video clips and commercial movies – from the Internet for near-instant access. A few years ago, the annual conferences held by the UK’s Digital Television Group (DTG) were about new developments in live over-the-air TV, bigger and flatter screen displays, time-shifting with recorders and all the electronics nuts and bolts that made it all possible. In contrast, newer conferences are mostly about new-wave ‘digital broadcasting’. This is mainly about ways of grabbing viewers’ eyeballs for more than a few seconds and earning revenue from successful grabbing. Channel 4, the UK’s commercially funded public station, recently switched bosses. There are no surprises then when newly appointed chief commercial officer (CCO) Rak Patel came from Spotify with the remit “to accelerate the network’s commercial growth” and manage a “seamless transition from linear to digital while maximising advertising revenue”. Speaking at the DTG event, Patel said that C4 aims to become the first ‘digital’ public service provider, and by 2030, will be earning 50% of its revenue from digital. Because C4 is a public service broadcaster, it will be answerable to Ofcom (on issues such as honesty, accuracy and decency), which Internet streaming services are not. The same strictures should also affect Channel 5 broadcasting and My5 streaming, which have now relaunched as “5”, a single service that unites the linear and streaming/ digital platforms. 60 Patel was vague on what actual changes C4 would make to achieve his goals, but within days of the DTG event, Channel 4 had announced that the broadcaster’s video content would be made available on Spotify. Presumably, the deal had not been signed before Patel spoke. Arguably, the most important technical development and the enabling lynch pin to the fusion of linear (traditional) and digital ‘broadcasting’ is the service and system called Freely. The company behind Freely is Everyone TV (formerly Digital UK), which is backed by all the UK’s public service broadcasters: the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. Freely describes itself as “the newest and most exciting way to do free TV”, but was present only in the conference foyer to celebrate its first birthday with balloons and cup-cakes. If ever there were a vitally important new development that cried out for a clear message, it is Freely; but in stark contrast to the wonderful job done by Digital UK in handling the big switch between analog and digital TV, Everyone TV just isn’t messaging clearly. The company’s publicity remains a confusion of marketing hyperbole, with no clear and simple explanation of what Freely actually does and how it does it. Freely’s Front of House PR seems out of their depth on anything technical, with answers to basic questions reading as if they come from a sanitised hymn sheet. So facts on Freely are surprisingly hard to come by. The TV set-makers signed up with Freely are wary of talking to the press. This is very different from the way Digital TV operated. There must be skilled people inside Everyone/Freely who could talk clearly, but they are well hidden and probably have no idea what it is like for the outside world to show serious interest in the Freely solution. The irony is that the problem that Freely solves is self-evident to anyone with an existing Smart TV. For example, TV station Talk TV moved from Freeview broadcast to Internet distribution but still has a Freeview channel slot (280). A Freeview Smart TV finds Talk TV as a TV channel and then has to switch itself from digital terrestrial reception to online app access. This can take painful minutes of dark screens, loading messages and pre-recorded video clips and audio jingles, and sometimes an unexplained failure to connect. What emerges from the Freely PR fog is that Freely uses a new program listing system which seamlessly combines off-air broadcast stations with online station sites. A new generation of Freely capable TV sets uses the Freely listings to let viewers surf for programs regardless of whether they arrive over the air or down a line. As far as I can understand from Freely’s publicity mush, a Freely TV can perform its magic when receiving programs from a combination of Freeview digital terrestrial from an aerial and the Internet, or from the Internet alone. The Internet connection can be either by Wi-Fi or Ethernet. But Freely does not work with Freesat satellite TV. I asked Freely to confirm or correct this simple factual understanding. What I got back was a dollop of marketing speak: All you need is Wi-Fi for a Freely TV to be able to access all your favourite shows live and on demand, all in one place. No need for a dish or aerial. Those who choose to connect their TV via a hybrid Wi-Fi and DTT connection will also receive additional live Freeview channels delivered over DTT, alongside all the benefits of the Wi-Fi connection seamlessly integrating live and on demand shows. Freely is not a satellite product. Everyone TV offers a TV platform for every household however they choose to connect with Freely (Wi-Fi), Freeview (DTT), and Freesat (satellite). This unclear response even manages to confuse and contradict on the simple matter of satellite reception. From my own hands-on experience, I can confirm that self-switching from off-air reception to online stream does not work on an LG Smart TV with Freesat free-to-air satellite reception. So, it’s highly likely that Freely does not work with Freesat. Practical Electronics | August | 2025 The Fox Report Barry Fox’s technology column This matters because, in some parts of the UK (notably West Sussex), interference from foreign stations that are using the same or similar terrestrial frequencies to the UK transmitters completely swamps Freeview when the weather is warm and good for long-distance reception. Freesat is then the only free way to receive offair ‘linear’ TV. Freesat has already dropped its previously very valuable feature of letting viewers use a phone app to program a Freesat recorder remotely. For instance, to record a TV program while sitting in the pub. The writing on the wall tells me that Freesat is on the way out. Much as the wall-writing tells that we’re unlikely to get any clear answers from the ‘front of house’ PR people at Freely. This was borne out at the DTG foyer display, where Freely was promising useful new features such as: • Backwards TV Guide, where the viewer can easily scroll back to a program broadcast in the last week and either immediately start streaming it or add it to My List. • Never Miss, which highlights the most popular shows which are either just missed or just coming up. • My List, the option to save links to up to 50 personal favourite shows All this sounds good for viewers. But viewers can only benefit by junking their existing TV set and buying a new one with Freely hardware and software locked inside. The obvious way around this is to offer a dongle like the Amazon Fire Stick, which connects to an existing TV by HDMI port and accesses the Internet by Wi-Fi. At last year’s DTG event, Freely representatives were talking about dongles in the future, but at this year’s event, they seemed to have forgotten this. “What’s a dongle?”, replied one of Freely’s FOH people advisers on the Freely display when I asked what progress had been made on letting viewers up-date old TVs. His colleague then came to the rescue, thinking that a dongle was “something that connects with USB”. (No, in this case, it connects with HDMI). The cotton-wool reply that Freely gave me when I followed through after the event is that: Practical Electronics | August | 2025 Freely is currently focused on partnering with smart TVs, and in its first year has partnered with half of the UK TV market. Everyone TV, with Freeview and Freesat, has experience of launching devices such as set-top boxes. For Freely, we are continually exploring new features, new partners and availability, all part of our roadmap to continue to grow and enhance the viewer experience. Freely have not announced anything on devices outside of smart TVs. The absence of a Freely capable Amazon Stick can’t be because of technical issues; Freely is already built into Amazon Fire TVs. Reading between the lines of the official Freely hymn sheet, it’s likely that the TV manufacturers see Freely as a great new way to sell new TV sets to people who are perfectly happy with their existing and often near-new sets. It suits Freely to help them by doing no dongle deals – much as the IT industry sees Microsoft’s policy of obsoleting whole rafts of perfectly good Windows 10 PCs as a great new way to sell new computers. Of course, this is terrible for consumers. But significantly, just days after the DTH event, Tim Davie, the BBC’s Director General, gave a speech to the Royal Television Society that clearly endorsed the idea of bolt-on devices such as dongles that would add Freely to existing TVs. It would surely be in the interests of all the broadcasters backing Freely to kick Freely into gear on dongles. Several speakers at the DTG Summit referred, inevitably, to AI. One area where it is seen as a way to grow audiences and increase revenue is in helping viewers cut through the jungle of different programs on offer through an ever-increasing number of sites, service and channels. AI would learn more about viewers’ likes and dislikes than they do themselves. This is unlikely to upset anyone, because it is what Tivo pioneered decades ago. But another use for AI is more contentious. This was mentioned by Fiona Campbell, Controller, Youth Audience at BBC iPlayer and BBC Three, but only in passing. Experiments are under way on training AI to ‘watch’ a football match and create a spoken commentary on the fly. The DTG’s conferences have always been notable for the excellence of the live subtitling provided for deaf members of the audience, often representing deaf-care bodies and services. In the past, the subtitling has been provided by court reporters, trained to type what’s said by lawyers, judges and witnesses at real-time speed. The DTG had found that automatic captioning can give frustratingly bad results. You can see this for yourself by switching on hard-of-hearing subtitles while watching a movie auto-captioned by YouTube’s basic system. The old film noir ‘Framed’ with Glenn Ford is a good example. Music is captioned as ‘applause’ and the displayed dialogue text often bears only passing resemblance to the actors’ spoken words and lines of text appear in the wrong order (see https:// youtu.be/PoTInQtfEEs). For example, we have seen these automatic subtitles convert the video game title “Doom Eternal” into “due maternal”! The DTG has now partnered with Australian company AI-Media (www. ai-media.tv) to prove that AI subtitling is now a viable alternative to court reporting. The captions come up live, almost immediately and with next to no mistakes. Said a spokeswoman for the company, “The solution we provided for the DTG event was our LEXI AI captioning. This was combined with our LEXI Viewer display”. The LEXI system is pre-trained with a ‘Topic Model’, which is essentially a library of technical words and specialist phrases that speakers are likely to use. The system was first used at the 2024 DTG Summit, and independent accuracy tests showed an average accuracy rate of 99.2% NER (Number, Edition error and Recognition error rate). A rate of 100% would mean no mistakes made. I shudder to think what the NER is for YouTube movies. Anyone in search of more detail of the system used can read a full study and case history on AI-Media’s website: https://www.ai-media.tv/wp-content/ uploads/AI_Media_Case_Study_ DTGPE Summit _FINAL-14.06.24.pdf 61