Freely, the streaming-based heir to Freeview and Freesat, has just picked up 11 new channels from 5, and they went live on the platform this week.
The additions cover true crime, police shows, medical documentaries, made-for-TV thrillers, and – probably the one that will matter most in households with young children over the summer holidays – a dedicated Milkshake! channel.
It’s the biggest single batch of channels Freely has added since Warner Bros. Discovery brought its free-to-air portfolio across at the start of the year, and it lands at a moment when the platform is under more scrutiny than usual – with the government’s consultation on switching off Freeview closing in a matter of weeks.
So let’s go through what’s arrived, what it means if you’re already using Freely, and what it doesn’t change.
A Quick Freely Reminder
If you’re new to any of this, Freely is Everyone TV’s streaming platform – and Everyone TV is the same organisation that runs Freeview and Freesat.
Rather than pulling channels in through an aerial or a satellite dish, Freely delivers them entirely over your broadband connection.
You get BBC, ITV, Channel 4, 5 and dozens of other channels in a single programme guide, with seven days of catch-up built in. It’s free, with no monthly cost beyond the TV Licence.
It launched in April 2024, and for the first 18 months the only way to get it was to buy a new smart TV with Freely built in – from Hisense, Panasonic, Toshiba, Bush, Sharp, TCL, METZ or Amazon’s Fire TV.
That changed in November 2025, when the first standalone box arrived. There are now two leading devices:
The Netgem Pleio at £99 – a small puck running Android TV 14 with full Google Play Store access, so you get Freely alongside Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max and everything else on the same device.
It also comes with a gamepad and cloud gaming through Pleio Extra, free for the first 12 months. After a few months of price changes, Netgem settled on a permanent £99 in April.
The Manhattan Aero at £89.99 – simpler, running TiVo OS, no app store and no dedicated gaming hub, but with an Ethernet port the Pleio lacks and no subscriptions attached to anything (other than the 3rd party streaming services, of course). It went up from £69.99 in May after component costs rose.
The 11 New Channels
The new channels are scattered across the guide rather than grouped together, so you’ll find them slotted into gaps between existing services rather than in one tidy block.
5Cops – Channel 69
Rolling police programming, and the broadest of the policing channels in this batch. Expect Traffic Cops, Motorway Cops, Police Night Shift 999 and Police Code Zero, among others.
If you’ve ever settled in front of 5 on a weekday evening, you’ll know the format – blue lights, dashcam footage, and a narrator explaining what’s about to go wrong.
5Police Interceptors – Channel 70
A single-show channel, running Police Interceptors around the clock.
It’s one of 5’s longest-running and best-known factual series, following specialist police units, and now it has a channel to itself. If you like it, this is fairly close to a dream scenario.
5Movies – Channel 77
Exclusive to Freely and 5’s own streaming service, and the new home for 5’s made-for-TV thriller output.
Titles include Danger Rocks The Cradle, You’ll Never Leave Me, Deadly Surrogacy and A Killer Behind Closed Doors.
You can probably guess the tone from the names alone – these are the kind of films that turn up on a wet Sunday afternoon and are surprisingly hard to switch off once you’ve started.
5A&E – Channel 84
Emergency medicine, filmed inside real hospitals. The lineup includes 999 Critical Condition, A&E After Dark and Casualty 24/7.
It’s a genre 5 has done consistently well, and there’s clearly enough of it in the archive to sustain a channel.
5Crime – Channel 85
True crime and the messier end of factual programming, with Rogue Claimers, Call the Bailiffs, Killer at the Crime Scene, 999 Killer on the Line and Making a Serial Killer.
There’s now a fair amount of true crime on Freely between this and the existing AMC channels, so this one is entering a competitive corner of the guide.
5Medical – Channel 107
Another Freely exclusive, and a broader medical channel than 5A&E. Shows include GPs Behind Closed Doors, Autopsy, Don’t Tell the Doctor, Plastic Surgery Nightmares and Maternity Ward.
Less emergency room, more consulting room – though Autopsy rather stretches that description.
5Yorkshire Vet – Channel 108
Exclusive to Freely (and the streaming service), and another single-show channel: The Yorkshire Vet, 24 hours a day.
The series follows working vets across the Yorkshire countryside, and it’s been one of 5’s genuine successes – it picked up an RTS Yorkshire award, and it has the sort of loyal audience that makes a dedicated channel make sense.
5Bargain-Loving Brits – Channel 118
The Bargain-Loving Brits franchise on a loop, covering Bargain-Loving Brits in the Sun, Bargain-Loving Brits by the Sea and Bargain-Loving Brits in Blackpool.
Cheerful, undemanding, and there’s rather more of it than you might expect.
5Trucking Hell – Channel 119
Heavy vehicles and the people who recover them, with Trucking Hell, Outback Truckers and Trucking Heavy.
A small genre with a devoted following, and one that doesn’t get much of a look-in elsewhere on free TV.
5History – Channel 128
Exclusive to Freely, and the most sober channel of the eleven. Programming includes Inside the Tower of London, Secrets of the Royal Palaces and Walking Wartime Britain.
British history, royal palaces and wartime documentaries – the sort of thing that used to fill weekend afternoons on terrestrial TV.
Milkshake! – Channel 360
The one that’s likely to get the most use over the next few weeks.
Milkshake! is 5’s preschool brand, and this is a dedicated channel for it, exclusive to Freely and 5’s streaming service. Shows include Fireman Sam, Thomas & Friends, Mimi’s World, Stan and Gran and The World According to Grandpa.
Importantly, this isn’t just the morning Milkshake! block repeated. 5 says the channel carries different content and a different schedule to the 6-9am slot on the main channel, so it’s a separate proposition rather than a rerun.
It sits at 360, in the children’s section of the guide rather than alongside the other new arrivals, which makes sense – though it does mean it’s easy to miss if you’re scrolling the entertainment numbers looking for what’s new.
What “Exclusive To Freely” Means Here
Five channels – 5Movies, 5Medical, 5Yorkshire Vet, 5History and Milkshake! – are described as exclusive to Freely at launch.
That’s true as far as TV platforms go: you won’t find them on Freeview, Sky, Virgin Media or anywhere else at the moment.
But 5’s own announcement also confirms all 11 channels are available on 5 Streaming, the broadcaster’s own service. And 5 Streaming is on most of the devices you’d already have, including every Freely TV and box.
So “exclusive” here means exclusive among TV guides, not exclusive full stop.
Where Freely Stands Right Now
Whatever the label, Freely has had a very good few months.
The platform passed two million monthly active users in July, according to Everyone TV’s own figures, having doubled from one million around December and 500,000 the previous September.
Its record day for active users was the World Cup final on July 19.
Meanwhile, the forecasts for traditional TV keep pointing the same way. Research published in June put Freeview at 9.7 million main sets today, falling to under a million by 2034, with Freely climbing past 10 million households in the same period.
And the government has now published its green paper on the future of free TV, with a stated preference for switching Freeview off as early as December 31 2034, and a longer option running to 2044 as the alternative it’s seeking views on.
That consultation closes at 11:59pm on August 31, with a decision promised later this year.
Which is the backdrop against which 11 new channels arrive. Everyone TV isn’t a neutral party in the switch-off debate – it runs Freeview, Freesat and Freely simultaneously, and sits on the government’s Future TV Taskforce – so a fuller channel list landing in this particular window is convenient timing, whether or not it was planned that way.
The Channels Have Been Trickling In
Freely’s channel count has been climbing steadily since late 2025.
Talking Pictures TV arrived early in November, ahead of its announced schedule. BLAZE followed in December. Channel 4’s three streaming-only channels landed in October.
The Warner Bros. Discovery batch – including TLC going free-to-air for the first time – came through at the start of this year. ITV’s two channels have appeared too.
Not everything announced has materialised. Some channels from the October 2025 batch are still absent, more than nine months on, and a few others arrived in smaller numbers than originally trailed.
Going further back, the promises made in April 2025 have taken considerably longer to land than the wording suggested at the time.
It’s a mixed record: most of what’s been promised has eventually turned up, but “coming in 2026” has proved a flexible sort of commitment.
Set against that, 5 delivering 11 channels in one go is a decent result.
So What Actually Changes If You Already Have Freely?
Most of these channels already existed. Anyone with a Freely device could open the 5 app and watch a good number of them. Nothing was locked away.
What changes is where they live. They’re now in the Freely EPG, with channel numbers, sitting alongside BBC One and ITV1 and everything else. You can scroll to them, see what’s on, and press OK.
And that is precisely what Freely is meant to do. BBC content is all in iPlayer. ITV content is all in ITVX. The pitch has never been that Freely gives you things you couldn’t otherwise reach – it’s that you shouldn’t have to know which app to open, or remember which broadcaster made the thing you want to watch.
Putting 5’s channels on numbers 69 through 360 is that idea working as intended. For anyone who came to Freely from an aerial and thinks in channel numbers rather than apps – which is a lot of people – it’s an improvement, even though the underlying content isn’t new.
It also means the channels turn up in search, in the guide, and in the “what’s on now” strip, which is where most casual viewing actually starts.
Where These Channels Came From
There’s a bit of history here worth looking back at.
Back in March 2025, Channel 5 and its streaming service My5 merged under a single brand, becoming simply “5”.
Part of that relaunch was the arrival of 15 free ad-supported channels on the streaming service – and several names from that original list, including Police Interceptors, 5 Cops, Bargain Loving Brits, The Yorkshire Vet and Milkshake!, are the same ones arriving on Freely now.
Those channels came about partly because a planned merger with Pluto TV was quietly shelved. Instead of folding the two together, 5 took the Pluto approach – curated, always-on channels built from an existing library – and applied it to its own catalogue.
So what’s landing on Freely this week isn’t a fresh commission. It’s 5 extending distribution of something it built over a year ago, which is exactly how the broadcaster is framing it.
Kiaran Saunders, 5’s VP of Distribution and Business Development, said launching the channels on Freely would help expand their reach beyond 5’s own streaming platform and into audiences’ homes, adding that as more people stream live TV, the aim is to meet them where they are.
Jonathan Thompson, Everyone TV’s chief executive, pointed to the range on offer – true crime, films, children’s content – and said the Milkshake! channel in particular gives families more to watch over the summer holidays.
The Bit That Still Isn’t Solved
Eleven channels is a meaningful addition, and it takes Freely past 70 live channels – closing the gap with Freeview a little further.
But the gap hasn’t closed. A number of channels that Freeview viewers watch regularly are still aerial-only, and there’s no public timetable for most of them.
Several smaller broadcasters simply don’t have the streaming infrastructure, or the commercial incentive, to make the move.
That matters more than it used to, because the switch-off consultation closes on August 31.
If Freely is going to be the answer for households that currently rely on an aerial, the honest position today is that it’s a very good service that still doesn’t carry everything Freeview does – and can’t record any of it.
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