Five new channels landed on Freely this week, taking the streaming platform’s true crime section from crowded to seriously competitive – and finally clearing a promise Everyone TV made ten months ago.
Channels like True Crime UK, AMC Reality and more are now in the Freely guide – all come from AMC, and all five were first announced back in October 2025, as part of a batch pencilled in for “2026”.
The five are scattered across the guide rather than grouped together, sitting between numbers 73 and 111 – see below for the full list of channels added to Freely in recent months.
What Is Freely Again?
If you’re new to any of this (and if you’re that one loyal reader who always gets annoyed – feel free to skip to the next section), Freely is Everyone TV’s streaming platform – and Everyone TV is the same organisation behind Freeview and Freesat.
Instead of pulling channels in through an aerial or a satellite dish, Freely delivers them 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, and 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 main options:
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 one device. It also comes with a gamepad and cloud gaming through Pleio Extra, free for the first 12 months.
The Manhattan Aero at £89.99 – simpler, running TiVo OS, with no app store and no gaming hub, but with an Ethernet port the Pleio lacks. It went up from £69.99 in May after component costs rose.
The Five New AMC Channels
AMC already had a presence on Freely, and this batch expands it considerably. Here’s what’s arrived and where to find it.
Love After Lockup – Channel 73
A reality series following relationships between recently released prisoners and their partners, documenting the business of rebuilding a life after incarceration. It now has a channel of its own.
True Crime UK – Channel 74
A joint venture between AMC and Paramount, already available on Freeview and Freesat. True crime documentaries, with a UK slant.
Evidence of Evil – Channel 88
Built around the documentary series of the same name, which examines how forensic technology and DNA testing cracked criminal cases. Episodes look at high-profile investigations where modern science identified perpetrators decades after the fact.
Bloodline Detectives – Channel 89
True crime focused on genetic genealogy and familial DNA testing used to solve cold cases. Hosted by former prosecutor Nancy Grace, it details how DNA techniques brought convictions in unsolved homicides and assaults.
AMC Reality – Channel 111
The broadest of the five. Reality programming including Growing Up Hip Hop, Amazing Wedding Cakes, Million Dollar Matchmaker and LA Hair, with Everyone TV also pointing to Braxton Family Values and Mama June: From Not to Hot. It’s also available on ITVX.
Three of the five – Evidence of Evil, Bloodline Detectives and Love After Lockup – are streaming-only, so you won’t find them elsewhere through an aerial.
Where Everything Sits In The Guide
Everyone TV has published the channel numbers for everything added this year, which is useful if you’ve stopped rescanning and wondered where things went. The full list:
| Channel | Number | Provider |
|---|---|---|
| TLC | 17 | Warner Bros. Discovery |
| Quest | 18 | Warner Bros. Discovery |
| Quest Red | 34 | Warner Bros. Discovery |
| DMAX | 35 | Warner Bros. Discovery |
| Food Network | 39 | Warner Bros. Discovery |
| Really | 40 | Warner Bros. Discovery |
| The Chase | 65 | ITV |
| Saturday Night Every Night | 66 | ITV |
| 5Cops | 69 | 5 |
| 5Police Interceptors | 70 | 5 |
| Love After Lockup | 73 | AMC |
| True Crime UK | 74 | AMC |
| 5Movies | 77 | 5 |
| 5A&E | 84 | 5 |
| 5Crime | 85 | 5 |
| Evidence of Evil | 88 | AMC |
| Bloodline Detectives | 89 | AMC |
| 5Medical | 107 | 5 |
| 5Yorkshire Vet | 108 | 5 |
| AMC Reality | 111 | AMC |
| 5Bargain-Loving Brits | 118 | 5 |
| 5Trucking Hell | 119 | 5 |
| 5History | 128 | 5 |
Worth knowing that the Warner Bros. Discovery channels sit on different numbers to their Freeview positions. TLC is on 17 and Quest on 18 on Freely, where Freeview has Quest on 12 and Really on 17. If you navigate by number rather than by name, that’s going to catch you out.
What Else Has Landed This Year
The six Warner Bros. Discovery channels came through at the start of the year – Quest, Quest Red, Food Network, DMAX, Really and TLC, with TLC going free-to-air for the first time and bringing a revived Mock the Week with it.
ITV’s two channels, The Chase and Saturday Night Every Night, have also quietly turned up on 65 and 66. Those were promised back in April 2025 as coming “later this year”, so they’ve taken a while.
And at the end of July, 5 delivered 11 channels in one go: 5Cops, 5Police Interceptors, 5Movies, 5A&E, 5Crime, 5Medical, 5Yorkshire Vet, 5Bargain-Loving Brits, 5Trucking Hell, 5History and a dedicated Milkshake! channel for preschool viewers.
Five of those – 5Movies, 5Medical, 5Yorkshire Vet, 5History and Milkshake! – are exclusive to Freely among TV platforms, though all 11 are also on 5’s own streaming service, which is available on most devices you’d already own.
That batch was the biggest single addition Freely has had, and most of the channels weren’t new commissions. They came out of 5’s March 2025 relaunch, when Channel 5 and My5 merged under a single “5” brand and the broadcaster launched 15 free ad-supported channels on its streaming service.
The Delivery Record Is Still Patchy
The AMC five arriving is good news, but it certainly took its time.
They were announced in October 2025 as part of a 10-channel batch. Talking Pictures TV turned up early, in November. BLAZE followed in December. The rest took until now, or haven’t turned up at all – Bloomberg TV+ still isn’t on the channel list.
Go further back and the pattern holds. The April 2025 announcement of 16 new channels took considerably longer to deliver than the wording implied at the time.
Most of what gets promised does eventually arrive. But “coming in 2026” has proved a flexible sort of commitment.
Freely’s Future
All of this lands in a particular window. The government published its green paper on the future of free TV in June, 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.
Everyone TV isn’t exactly a neutral party in that debate. It runs Freeview, Freesat and Freely simultaneously, and sits on the government’s Future TV Taskforce, which has already backed the earlier date.
Jonathan Thompson, Everyone TV’s chief executive, has previously framed the platform’s growth as evidence of broadband’s expanding role in delivering free television.
What hasn’t changed is the gap. A number of channels that Freeview viewers watch regularly are still aerial-only, with no public timetable for most of them, because the smaller broadcasters behind them either can’t afford the streaming infrastructure or can’t see the commercial case for it.
And Freely still can’t record anything – which, for anyone weighing up whether it can replace the box they’ve got now, is still the sticking point – and looks likely to stay that way.
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