The Manhattan Aero, one of the two leading standalone boxes for Freely, has picked up a substantial software update this week – and, separately, it’s gained a cloud gaming service for the first time.
The update, v20, brings a couple of things Aero owners have been asking about for a while. The most useful for most people is a proper TV Guide for the box’s free TiVo Channels, which turns a slightly awkward corner of the interface into something you can actually browse.
The other headline feature lets the remote wake the box over Bluetooth, so you’re no longer forced to keep the Aero in the line of sight.
And arriving alongside it is Blacknut – a cloud gaming service that lets you play more than 1,000 games on the Aero with no console required. Sounds familiar? Yes, like the competing Pleio from Netgem – the Aero is dipping into gaming now too – for those who want it.
There’s a lot more in v20, including a new sports carousel, voice tuning by channel number, and a decent list of bug fixes.
A Quick Reminder: What Is The Aero?
If you’re new to all this, the Aero is Manhattan’s standalone Freely streaming box. Freely is Everyone TV’s platform – the same organisation behind Freeview and Freesat – and it delivers live TV and seven days of catch-up entirely over your broadband connection, with no aerial required.
The Aero runs TiVo OS alongside Freely, which means you get BBC, ITV, Channel 4, 5 and 60-plus other live channels in a single guide, plus a selection of streaming apps on top. There’s no monthly fee for any of the core functionality.
It launched in February at £69.99 and now costs £89.99, following a price rise driven by component costs that have hit much of the industry.
Even at the higher price, it remains the most affordable way onto Freely if recording isn’t something you need – the recording-capable Humax Aura EZ is the only Freely box that can record anything (but only via the aerial), and it costs £249.
I gave the Aero an Editor’s Choice in my full Aero review, with its missing apps being the main thing holding it back. This update doesn’t add any new streaming apps, but it does sharpen a lot of what’s already there.
A Proper TV Guide For TiVo Channels
This is the change most Aero owners will actually use – once you work out where to find it.
If you’ve used Pluto TV, Tubi or any of the other FAST services (free ad-supported streaming TV), you’ll already know the idea behind TiVo Channels: a set of free, always-on streaming channels, funded by ads, sitting apart from your Freely line-up.
The Aero has carried these for a while. What it didn’t have was a proper way to browse them – you could see what was playing, but not what was coming up, with no guide to scroll the way you would with Freeview.
That’s what v20 adds. There’s now a full TV Guide for TiVo Channels, showing what’s on now and over the next two days across the line-up. Highlight a programme and press OK to jump straight to it, and you can add favourites for quicker access next time.
So it’s a very welcome addition, but you’re likely to face some confusion: after this update there are now two separate things both called “TiVo Channels”, and they’re not the same.
The one you already know is the TiVo Channels section in the left-hand menu on the Home screen. That’s unchanged – it’s the discovery hub, showing thumbnailed recommendations of free shows, films and channels. Useful for browsing, but there’s no guide there.
The new guide lives in a separate place: the TiVo Channels app. To open it, press the +FREE button on your Aero remote, or go to the apps screen and find the new TiVo Channels app at the start of My Apps.
That’s the one with the actual TV Guide. A live channel starts playing and a mini guide opens over it; select Go to Guide for the full grid.
It’s confusing at first, but once you’ve opened the app a couple of times, you’ll know where to go. However, it’s worth knowing in advance, because it isn’t obvious.
One more quirk while you’re in there: as expected, the Guide button on the Aero remote still opens Freely’s TV Guide, not this one. To reach the TiVo Channels guide you go +FREE, then Go to Guide.
And there’s plenty to browse once you’re in. TiVo Channels now spans more than 400 free streaming channels, plus a large library of free on-demand films and shows.
The mix runs from network-style channels like Sony’s Action Hits and Comedy Hits, through news (Bloomberg, CNN International, GB News), music (MTV, Vevo), sports (UFC, FIFA+, Rugby Pass TV) and a big children’s section (Pokémon, Teletubbies, Baby Shark TV).
The show-specific channels are where it gets fun, with dedicated channels for the likes of Hell’s Kitchen, Mr. Bean, MasterChef Australia and Unsolved Mysteries, plus a run of classics including JAG, MacGyver, Hawaii Five-O, Xena and Farscape.
The wider discovery section in the sidebar also reaches beyond TiVo’s own channels, pulling in free live and on-demand content from Plex, Tubi, Pluto TV and Rakuten TV – some of which plays inside TiVo Channels, and some of which opens in the provider’s own app.
Just don’t expect all of that to appear in the new guide: the guide only covers the channels delivered directly through TiVo. Between the two, though, there’s an enormous amount of free viewing here.
You Can Now Hide The Aero Away
The other headline feature is a smaller, more practical win.
The Aero remote can now wake the box from standby over Bluetooth, which means it no longer needs a clear line of sight to work. Until now, waking the box relied on infra-red, the same as an old TV remote – point it at the box, and it needs to see the box.
That was a proper limitation, and one I flagged in my review. If you wanted to tuck the Aero out of sight – behind the TV, or inside a cabinet – you couldn’t, because there was no way to turn it back on without pointing the remote straight at it.
Now you can put it wherever suits you, as long as it’s somewhere ventilated, and wake it over Bluetooth regardless.
Blacknut Cloud Gaming Comes To Aero
Separately from v20, the Aero has gained cloud gaming for the first time, through a service called Blacknut. You’ll find it in All Apps.
Blacknut streams more than 1,000 games over the internet, so there’s no console, gaming PC or download required – the game runs on Blacknut’s servers and streams to your Aero the way Netflix streams a film.
To play, you pair a compatible Bluetooth gamepad under Devices, then Bluetooth Accessories. Manhattan says most modern Android-compatible controllers should work, and it’s specifically tested the Sony DualSense and the Xbox Series X|S controllers.
If you don’t have a gamepad to hand, there’s a fallback: launch a game, scan the QR code on your TV, and you can use your phone as a virtual controller through Blacknut’s companion app.
Blacknut is a paid subscription, though you can try eligible games free for up to 15 minutes without even creating an account, which is a fair way to see whether any of this appeals to you.
And that’s the honest question here – the jury is still out on whether people really want to game on their streaming device, let alone their Freely box. It’s not obvious there’s a big audience of people who’ll buy an £89.99 box to watch free telly and then pay a monthly fee to play games on it.
But it was probably a matter of time. The rival Netgem Pleio built gaming into its whole pitch, bundling a gamepad and its own cloud gaming through Pleio Extra. Amazon keeps pushing its Luna service on Fire TV.
With gaming increasingly treated as a standard streaming-box feature, Manhattan joining in – in some form – always looked likely. Whether Aero owners take it up is another matter, but the option is there now for those who want it.
Everything Else In v20
Beyond the headline features, the update brings a handful of smaller additions:
- A new Sports carousel pulls together live, upcoming and on-demand sports content in one place, which should make it quicker to find something to watch.
- You can now tune to a channel by voice by saying its number.
- The Aero will warn you when your remote’s batteries are running low, giving you a heads-up before it stops responding.
- Audio Guidance – the spoken interface for anyone who needs it – has a much more natural-sounding voice, and now supports more languages.
- And there are platform-wide performance and stability improvements, with Manhattan citing better responsiveness and memory use across TiVo OS.
The Bug Fixes
v20 also clears up a decent list of reported problems – and a couple of these are more significant than the usual tidying-up.
The most notable relates to Auto Frame Rate, the feature added back in the v19 update that switches the Aero’s HDMI output between 50 Hz and 60 Hz to match what you’re watching.
It turned out that switch could break playback: Disney+ could throw an Error 36, and Prime Video could fail to play or drop to a black screen. That’s now resolved.
A separate Prime Video issue is also fixed – on some 1080p TVs using HDCP 1.4, Prime Video could play in low-quality SD rather than HD, even while other apps looked fine.
The rest are more hardware-flavoured:
- Some Philips, Panasonic and JVC TVs could stop the Aero starting up correctly, or leave it stuck in recovery mode, due to HDMI signal compatibility. That’s been addressed.
- A rare fault could leave the Aero unable to start after going into standby, with the front LED flashing green and red. Also fixed.
- And the recessed reset button on the back of the box – which is meant to trigger a factory reset when held for 10 seconds – could fail to do its job. That’s now working as intended, which is exactly the sort of thing you want reliable given how often a factory reset has been the fix for the recent Freely problems.
How To Get The Update
The v20 rollout has already started – my own Aero is running the new version – but it goes out in stages, so you may not see it straight away.
The Aero only updates over the internet. Once it detects the update, it downloads in the background and installs the next time the box goes into standby, and it may ask you to restart once it’s done.
If yours hasn’t appeared yet, there’s nothing wrong. Leave it connected to the internet and in standby when you’re not using it, and it should arrive in time. You can check which version you’re on under Settings, then System.
Where That Leaves The Aero
v20 doesn’t reshape the Aero, but it’s a meaningful sharpening of a box I already rated highly. The TiVo Channels guide makes a useful chunk of free content far easier to actually use, and being able to hide the box away removes a small but real irritation.
The Aero still isn’t the one-box-for-everything device some people want. NOW, Paramount+ and Apple TV remain absent, though Manhattan has previously indicated NOW is still coming later this year.
And the wider resilience questions around Freely – laid bare by last month’s national outage, which hit the Aero along with everything else – haven’t gone anywhere.
But on its own terms, as a subscription-free Freely box you can plug in and largely forget about, the Aero is a slightly stronger proposition this week than it was last. And with cloud gaming now on board, it’s closed yet another gap on the pricier Pleio.
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