@nelix01
As earlier in this thread, you will know I think the AppleTV is the best streaming box out there, and EETV have done well to adopt it, even if they unavoidably had to leverage a large chunk of YouView IP for the EETV app there.
There will always be people who want to record though, and until everything you can think of is constantly available to stream, there will be a niche for PVRs.
I also don’t see Freely as the saviour of anything; while their hybrid FreeView/streaming approach is superior to EETV’s either/or, it isn’t the whole solution. However, if being on Freeview meant having to provide Freely with an IP stream, that would be a game changer. But I daresay poor old EETV would miss out on that 😢
I like YouView, from the day I bought a DRT-T1000 a few weeks after launch up until now. Even if that first one did suffer a bug so bad that even Humax couldn’t get the box going again, and had to just replace it 💔
And technically, most everything they did they got right, except maybe their foray with Sony TVs; but there’s a story there no-one’s telling, though I could make an educated guess.
However, commercially, it’s been a bumpy road; starting as retail, and intending to stay that way, then getting into bed with BT and TalkTalk, which we retail users hated, even though it turns out there probably wouldn’t be a YouView today if they hadn’t, and retail is now completely gone. But what I don’t understand is how they kept their independence, instead of being swallowed up by BT; I guess the broadcasting partners didn’t want to see that happen. So maybe there’s been some commercially canny thinking at YouView, playing off the big fish partners one against the other, so the minnow swims clear. 😛
*Longtime YouView box owner & broadband customer (was BT now EE), but only recently a full EETV subscriber*
