Britain’s public service broadcasters spend around £156 million a year beaming Freeview through the air to your aerial, at the same time as paying to deliver those same channels over the internet.
That figure comes from new research published today by Everyone TV, the organisation behind Freeview, Freesat and Freely. It was carried out by media analysts Oliver & Ohlbaum, and released ahead of a panel discussion at the Edinburgh TV Festival.
Most of the report is about production companies – who makes British telly, who pays for it, and what would happen to that if the broadcasters funding it got weaker.
But run through it, and you get something more familiar to Cord Busters readers: a fairly candid account of why the people running free TV in this country are in such a hurry to switch your aerial off.
The report ends by backing a move to internet-delivered TV in 2034, the earlier of the two dates the government is considering, with Everyone TV saying it believes a 2034 transition will best help it deliver free TV to everyone.
The consultation on that decision closes at 11:59pm on August 31, five days from now.
Along the way it sets out how much money is draining out of free television, what that means for the channels you watch, and why Freely getting onto as many devices as possible matters far more to the broadcasters than it might look from the outside.
£156 Million A Year To Keep The Aerial Working
If you’ve not been following this story, here’s the short version.
Freeview brings BBC One, ITV, Channel 4, 5 and dozens of other channels into your home through the aerial on your roof, with no bill beyond the TV Licence. Freesat does the same job through a satellite dish.
Freely, launched in April 2024, does it over your broadband connection instead – same channels, no aerial, and it’s the service built to eventually take over from both.
In June, the government published a green paper setting out two dates for the end of Freeview: December 31, 2034, or a time-limited extension to December 31, 2044.
It said there was a compelling case for the earlier date, while asking for views on whether the extension to 2044 is needed.
The broadcasters’ argument for going sooner has always been that they’re funding two delivery systems at once – the transmitter network and the internet – for a shrinking terrestrial audience.
That’s been the shape of the case for a while. What this research adds is the number: around £156 million a year across the public service broadcasters, spent on getting channels to aerials, running in parallel with what they spend getting the same channels to smart TVs and streaming boxes.
The report’s position is that switching off would let that money be redirected into programmes and services instead.
It cites government stakeholder papers on the 2034-to-2044 question as its source, which tells you the figure is already circulating inside the process rather than being introduced to it.
Whether £156 million is a lot depends on what you set it against. It’s more than the £121 million deficit the BBC ran last year, which is currently driving cuts. It’s also a fraction of the near-£4 billion the licence fee brings in annually, spread across several broadcasters.
I’d suggest holding both of those in mind, because the figure will be quoted in support of switching off, and it’s worth knowing its size in context.
The cost that doesn’t appear in that calculation is the one at your end. The green paper makes no promise of public money to help people get online, unlike the analogue switchover between 2008 and 2012, which relied on significant public investment.
For anyone who doesn’t otherwise want the internet, broadband is a new bill of roughly £27 a month to carry on watching telly they currently get for nothing.
Why The Money Argument Has Got Louder
The research is blunt about the state of the finances behind free TV.
Commercial public service broadcasters’ linear advertising revenue fell 13% to £2.2 billion in 2025 as viewing moved online and on demand.
BBC income is around a quarter lower in real terms than at the start of the current Charter, a drop of about £1.2 billion. And the report puts licence take-up at 80% of households in 2025/26, down from more than 90% in 2016/17.
That last one lines up with what we found in the BBC’s own annual accounts in July, when 539,000 homes dropped their licence in a single year, and the corporation’s internal risk assessment described its funding model as not sustainable.
The money coming into free British television is falling, and it’s falling from several directions at once.
Now put that next to the audience side. Forecasts published by Everyone TV in June, from analysts 3 Reasons, predict Freeview falling to under a million main sets by 2034, down from 9.7 million today, with Freely climbing to 10.5 million households.
Last month, Everyone TV reported Freely passing two million monthly users during the World Cup, with broadband-only viewing of England’s group games up 473% on the 2022 tournament.
Fewer viewers using the aerial, less money coming in, and a transmitter network that costs roughly the same either way.
The cost per remaining viewer climbs every year that passes. That’s the mechanism behind the push for 2034, and it’s a coherent argument even if you don’t like where it leads.
The counterweight, which we’ve written about before, is that the shrinking number of people left on the aerial cuts both ways. A forecast that barely anyone will be stranded is also a forecast that the old system is easier to switch off.
What The Money Actually Buys
The bulk of the report is dedicated to a different question: what British television would lose if the broadcasters funding it got weaker.
Take Adolescence, the Netflix drama that swept up eight Emmys, six BAFTAs and four Golden Globes. The report traces nearly everyone who made it back to public service television.
Stephen Graham, its star and co-writer, came up through This Is England on Channel 4 and Line of Duty on the BBC. Co-writer Jack Thorne got his breaks on Skins and This Is England ’86.
Erin Doherty came through Call the Midwife and Chloe. Director Philip Barantini had directed the Boiling Point series for BBC One. Warp Films, the Yorkshire company that produced it, was built on Channel 4 commissions.
The same pattern shows up elsewhere. Merman, founded by Sharon Horgan and Clelia Mountford, started with Catastrophe on Channel 4 in 2015 and Motherland on BBC Two the year after.
It now makes Bad Sisters for Apple TV, Divorce for HBO and Vladimir for Netflix. The 1% Club began on ITV in 2022 and has since been licensed into 15 territories.
The broader figures back the pattern up. Public service broadcasters accounted for 71% of UK original content investment in 2024 – £2.8 billion of £3.9 billion – and 85% of all original hours in 2025.
Around 40% of all UK producer revenue comes from their commissioning fees, the single largest source. They’ve commissioned 602 new production labels over the past decade, 79 of which now turn over more than £10 million a year, and 63% of their hours are made outside London.
Jonathan Thompson, chief executive of Everyone TV, said the sector’s global success was built on a system that takes creative risks and gives companies across the country the chance to grow.
Mark Oliver, chairman of Oliver & Ohlbaum, described the broadcasters as anchor investors in UK production, and said the stresses were showing as budgets came under pressure at a time of higher costs.
Prominence Is The Real Prize
There’s another thread in the report worth pulling out, because it explains something readers ask us about constantly.
Among the pressures it lists on the public service broadcasters are two that have nothing to do with transmitters. One is prominence – the risk that their services and content become harder to find on newer platforms and connected devices.
The other is fragmented viewing, with broadcasters having to distribute across a growing range of platforms at growing cost.
Both of those matter more, not less, once the aerial goes. An aerial delivers BBC One at number one and asks nothing of anybody.
A broadband future means free British TV arriving through hardware somebody else owns and designs – a smart TV, a streaming box, a stick – where placement is somebody else’s decision.
The government isn’t leaving that entirely to the market. The Media Act 2024 created a new prominence regime for the internet age, and Ofcom is still working through the details of how it will apply to connected TVs and streaming devices.
Broadly, the most-used platforms will have to make sure the public service apps are easy to find, and the final rules are expected later this year.
That’s a real protection, but look closely at what it actually covers. The rules are about the broadcasters’ own apps – iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4, 5. They say nothing about Freely.
So Amazon, for instance, could put iPlayer right at the front of the Fire TV home screen, tick every box the regulator asks for, and still never put Freely on a Fire TV stick.
You’d get the apps. You wouldn’t get the guide that puts all the live channels in one place with a proper number ordering, which is the bit that makes Freely feel like television rather than a folder full of apps.
Which is why Freely matters so much to the people behind it, and why the push to make it work is about more than replacing an aerial.
Freely is the one place where the broadcasters own the shop floor. On a box like the Manhattan Aero or the Netgem Pleio, the guide you land in is theirs, the channel order is theirs, and nobody else is deciding how far down the page BBC One sits.
The alternative is the situation we already have on the most popular streaming device in the country. Amazon sells Fire TV televisions with Freely built in, but Fire TV sticks don’t carry it.
When I asked Aidan Marcuss, Amazon’s vice president of Fire TV, about that in June, he said he was proud of the Freely work on TVs but couldn’t commit to plans for the sticks.
Prominence rules wouldn’t change that – they would get iPlayer and ITVX onto the home screen, and leave Freely exactly where it is.
Then there’s ownership, which adds one more wrinkle. Sarah Clarke, chief operating officer of ITV Media & Entertainment, is quoted in the report saying the public service system is under threat and that broadcasters and producers share an interest in strengthening it.
ITV Media & Entertainment is the division Sky agreed to buy in July, in a deal worth up to £1.6 billion and expected to complete in the second half of 2027.
Everyone TV is jointly owned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5, and it isn’t yet clear whether ITV’s stake there passes to Sky.
Sky, meanwhile, sells Sky Stream, which delivers live channels over broadband and does much of what a Freely box does.
Where This Goes Next
The consultation closes on August 31, and the government has said it will publish its decision in a white paper later this year. That decision – 2034 or 2044 – is the one that determines whether the aerial on your roof has eight years left or eighteen.
Running alongside it is the Charter Review, which will settle what the TV Licence becomes from 2028. The two collide in an obvious way: the licence is currently triggered by watching live TV or using BBC iPlayer, and once every channel arrives down the same broadband pipe as everything else, that distinction becomes considerably harder to draw.
Everyone TV has been clear about where it stands for a while now, and this research doesn’t change that so much as put more weight behind it – the production industry, the exports, the regional studios, all lined up behind the same 2034 date it was already backing.
What’s still missing is the other half of it. There’s a plan for when the aerial goes and a case for why, but no answer yet on what a household without broadband is supposed to do, what happens to Freesat, or what you’ll be paying for once every channel arrives down the same pipe. Those get decided in the white paper.
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So that will cost according to my calculation about £2.23 per person in the UK to receive signals over the air. Not such a big amount we all know what’s behind this. It’s trying to force people to watch commercials this will not succeed because we all know what we do during the commercial break. We all pick up our telephones as noted once by Jeremy Clarkson on who wants to be a millionaire they’re trying to force a change that really does not need to happen and for some reason this website has become a spokesperson for freely. I wonder if they will make it illegal to look at your telephone during commercialsI think it is very biased. What is written here all the time.
I agree. Sticking with Freesat until I’m forced away. Being able to record,series link,rewind fast forward and skip through adverts are key. Routing through multiple catch up apps without the benefits is as poor experience.
Absolutely. Completely agree. They don’t seem to be interested in caring about us though. Personally I spend about 14 hours a day at least watching TV. I love to record.
Speaking as an oldie, I bought a Manhattan Aero for Freely and I find it very confusing. It essentially has four “states”. There’s the Freely programme guide and the Freely apps. Then there’s the TiVo programme guide and the TiVo apps. It’s nowhere near as simple as a bog standard Freeview programme guide. If my old dad had had to cope with this he’d have given up in disgust. One day soon, I’ll be his age…
I am a dedicated Freeview watcher. Record programme’s save them for later and love skipping the never ending ads.
I am all for progress but with a cynical view on why the streaming services want to switch off the aerial. For sure there will be more ads to rake in more revenue, will they veto any sets that can record their content? As one person mentioned here, it’s not rocket science to make a recordable set but, would it even reach the market?
I fear,as usual that it will be an ill thought out switch off and we will be at the mercy of the robber baron’s!
The dvd player for me unless they stop the sale of them as well.
When the cat is out of the bag that people will not be able to record anymore they will not be happy. It seems like you’re trying to hide this fight from everybody and I can’t see any reason why somebody can’t come along with the device that you will be able to record freely. It’s not rocket science.
You can obviously record a program on a screen recording program on a PC. What you need is it linked to the EPG and maybe freely is limited in it’s licensing (as I have heard). Also freeview has extra info sent ie when the program actually starts/finishes, if it isn’t on time. That need cooperation from the broadcasters who see streaming as an excuse to stop you recording programs and skipping through adverts which you wouldn’t watch anyway.
I agree. Why is this not consumer lead? I want to be able to record and rewind pause live TV preferably without adverts but no that seems to happen these days
Freely. Tv. The. Way. Forward. I. Had. No. Proplem. With. It. Thats. The. Way. Forward top. Marks.
I hate Freely. I dislike the programme guide, compared to Freeview. I also hate the name. I only watch via Freeview.
When I am not streaming via apps, I only watch Freeview.
I notice Freely was down for quite a while. Thank god for Freeview.
Freely is awful.
Constant software updates make the TV unusable. We have spent hours over the last year trying to get the service to function adequately. Finally sent the TV back last week. Just an awful time wasting experience.
I can’t get my head round what Freely will look like once OTA is gone.
The current “live” channels use thousands of hours of repeats to fill the schedule for which there will be no place, so presumably they will divert to the app library rather than being shown (?) again – even the terminology is going to be confusing – and the live channels will just have first-run stuff, of which there is not enough.
There will be no need for creators to “lend” their assets to other apps; the only reason for a product to be shared at the moment is to generate revenue, but why would anyone in their right mind give viewers a reason to look elsewhere?
As for adverts, will there be fewer? As there is/will be no way to bypass ads, presumably the desired penetration figures will be reached far more quickly than now, so will they show the adverts fewer times, meaning advertising revenues fall (in which case there will be less cash to spend on new programming), or will there be even more ads as they will be seen by more people more of the time? Anyone who creates an app which bypasses ads will make a absolute fortune.
As for Freely apps, as a viewer I don’t care which “channel” shows the programme I want to watch – it’s all about content – and the more apps, the more fragmented the service becomes, meaning it will be more difficult to find specific items. Currently the search does not show every site offering a particular show or movie, so that needs sorting out as well. Maybe the future is that no apps are listed onscreen, just a big search box, a list of new content, and some recommendations which presumably, content providers will have to bid for.
It’s going to get very messy before it becomes the service it needs to be.
The UK government presently sees Arqiva as a critical national infrastructure provider, not just for the delivery of TV and radio but now also for communication with the ever growing number of smart meters, using dedicated radio spectrum rather than public internet lines. Does the government seriously believe, having set up this secure platform for communicating with smart meters, that this is worth preserving but the robust and dependable broadcasting system which presently sits alongside it should be done away with? If the answer is yes, an urgent reassessment of priorities is called for.
I don’t think the government will have any choice. Commercial broadcasters are going to quit traditional broadcasting systems in favour of internet streaming, regardless of what anyone else says.
Anything the government touches turns to crap.
They are useless.
I have absolutely no doubt the govt has already decided on the 2034 date. They are just going through the motions of pretending there is a process. All the lobbying we read about from the broadcasters will be used to justify the already decided decision.
I totally accept that for the vast majority of people this will not be a big deal as they already have, and are paying for a broadband connection. I have a broadband connection but I watch most of my tv through an aerial. I get good quality coverage for the HD channels.
But there are some people, mostly much older who don’t have, and don’t need a broadband connection. (I know this is sacrilege to many younger people ) but it is true. My father is one. He pays his licence fee and can switch on the tv and watch some entertainment. This will now add an extra £200-£300 per year and a lot of frustration when the internet fails from time to time.
And please spare me the lectures of all the great things he can get on the internet. He barely can work a mobile non internet phone. He recently walked to his doctors to make an appointment and was told they only can do it on the phone. The woman then said why don’t you go outside the surgery and ring from there. For many older people who just want a less stressful end to their law abiding lives all this sounds absurd and ridiculous.
I don’t want to stop the long March to the new uber technological future utopia. All I ask is govt and broadcasters spend a little bit of time perhaps coming up with a few tweaks and maybe some financial help for these people before just slamming the door shut behind them.
Freely just isn’t universal, yet. There are so many gaps to fill, not least of which is avalability. I bought a brand new LG tv last year and it doesn’t have Freely, or freeview catchup.
I wont be buying another tv for a good few years, assuming this one has longevity like my old Panasonic.
I bought an Aero box, which works, but it’s not an elegant solution.
There is no doubt Freely is the future but what I don’t understand is that if Everyone TV who own Freeview and Freely (and Freesat) want users to move to Freely then why on earth are they still adding channels to Freeview which is what we saw on August 19th?
The new channels are Your TV (channel 71) and Your TV Extra (channel 75)
https://www.freeview.co.uk/help/updates-alerts/channel-updates-19-august-2026
Maybe it’s because Freely is a hybrid service of internet streaming television and Freeview. So any new channel on Freeview also appears on Freely, for anyone who plugs an aerial into their Freely device.
No, Freely has nothing to do with terrestrial or satellite TV channels. It is not a hybrid service at all. It uses the internet, it’s an IPTV service only.
Have a look at the Manhattan Aero or Netgem Pleio. Purely IPTV.
Aeros and Play-dohs don’t have an aerial socket, but Freely tellies DO have an aerial socket.
Freely IS a hybrid service which includes Freeview, not Freesat!
It’s called “HbbTV”, which stands for Hybrid Broadcast Broadband Television.
Maybe for backwards compatibility, but Freely is fundamentally designed as a broadband-only IPTV platform and that is its future.
It’s ‘Pleio’ by the way, a sub-brand of Netgem.
It’s not a Freely TV. It’s the TV that is the hybrid service, offering channels via Freely (internet), Freeview (aerial), Freesat (satellite) or any combination of these.
The huge negative of Freely is that you cannot fast forward through adverts – and there are loads of them on the catchup services. I subscribe to Sky Stream, the essentials package, which gives me pretty much the same service as Freely, with a few extra Sky channels. I pay £5 a month to skip adverts on all catchup services apart from the third party offerings like Netflix, Prime etc.. That is well worth it to me. With Sky Stream I know I get the best quality picture and audio with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos where available.
Freely is great for the Freeview brigade but there are too many negatives for me to consider switching from Sky Stream.
The huge negative of Sky are the extortionate subscription charges.
The Sky Essentials package costs me around £12 a month if I take Netflix out of the equation. £5 extra for ad-skipping. The Sky Stream box is free. Even if you use Freely the Manhattan box costs the equivalent of £7.50 a month for a year. I feel Sky Stream is well worth what I pay for the sheer quality of the video and audio, range of essential channels and the curation. I wouldn’t call it a ‘huge subscription charge’. It’s equivalent to one DVD a month and you’re not locked in to a contract.
You also need to remember Channel 5 catchup is only available in HD with Sky and Virgin Media. On all other platforms it is standard definition only. I watch a fair bit of Channel 5 – series like Ellis are very good, if you like crime drama.
I’ve just had this problem after the new software update. Can’t access any channels but BBC 1 and 2. Done a factory reset, but still no channels on my Manhattan aero box. Now thinking of sending it back. Bloody nightmare.
If the powers that be want to move on and get more users of Freely, why isn’t there an android app for a start and an IOS app or even a browser based system. If it’s on android alone the user base would increase greatly. Same with adding to IOS and allowing it on firesticks and roku devices so people don’t need to buy a specific box and can use on existing devices instead.
I’ve been using the Freely Pleio for about 9 months now and not has any issues with it. It is 1000% times more reliable than Sky Stream, which I came from, which would constantly crash and need rebooting and became incredibly expensive after the initial offer ended.
I don’t notice the audio or picture quality downgrade many do (have Apple TV on the lounge and bedroom TV’s for films etc).
Only thing I miss is Sky News being on the EPG. I have to go in to the separate App or via Now TV to watch it. They’ve kept a spot for them – not sure why they aren’t there given they’re on all the Samsung TV’s etc.
1000% more reliable? That’s huge! My Sky Stream has never needed rebooting, never crashes and the cost is very reasonable. I effectively pay £12 a month for Sky Essentials and £5 for ad-skipping – which you can’t do at all with Freely. Then the Sky Stream puck is free, so that needs to be factored in. All in all Sky isn’t ‘incredibly expensive’ unless you have the premium channels – which you pay for on any platform.
I think there is something amiss with your setup. Most issues with Sky Stream are to do with the broadband service. Do you have a full fibre product?
I will avoid Freely until it’s available on mainstream TVs from the likes of Samsung and LG.
So would you consider Sharp, Toshiba, Phillips,JVC, Bush or Panasonic mainstream? All these brands have Freely TVs.
No. These brands are now made by Vestel, a large Turkish company. They are not made by the companies featured on the badge. Maybe ‘mainstream’ is the wrong term, I would use ‘quality’ instead.
Samsung and LG TVs, on the other hand, are made by the companies you would expect.
No quality TV comes with Freely.
While the claims that broadband is unreliable is true to a degree, its alot less likely to go down now than it used to be, so delivering over the internet isn’t something people should fear. Afterall, we watch HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+, iPlayer, ITVX, PlutoTV and more via that and mostly without issue or concern, so Freely shouldn’t have a suddenly-attached worry from people about if its reliable or not.
My only concern is standards. Not of the programming, but of the technical aspects of the channels. We have no unified delivery standard and the channels on Freely have gone backward in terms of quality advancements made:
No surround audio. Currently the channels are AAC 2.0 stereo with a bitrate ranging between 96kb/s to 128kb/s. Thats frankly appalling and you hear that degradation in audio quality, even through the most basic set of TV speakers, nevermind soundbars and surround systems.
The second is framerates. BBC channels are 50fps. everything else is 25 and that looks shockingly poor when trying to watch news, or sport or anything filmed in a studio (8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. Mock The Week, The Chase ect) – which is shot at 50fps and then cut down by the encoding of the broadcaster for the channel you’re about to watch to 25p – you get that awful soap-opera look which makes it hard to stomach. Simple things such as quality – matters!
As a concept; Freely is a great idea but current offerings are an inexcusable mess that looks like some joke setup.
If you want people to be behind the transition away from the expensive Freeview & Freesat, then give them the same quality on Freely, so that change doesn’t feel abrupt and a significant downgrade.
Its ‘Free’ but that doesn’t mean it has to be cheap!
The bottom line is that the internet is less reliable. Freeview has much redundancy built in with backup components and even duplicate power supplies, so a loss of service is rare. Most of us have lost our internet connection at some point, and if there’s a fault in your street you might be waiting days or even weeks to get the problem traced and fixed. Arqiva engineers are on standby at all times, even if it’s 6 a.m. on Christmas Day. Try getting Openreach out to the cabinet outside your house on a public holiday and they probably won’t even answer the phone. So the question really boils down to whether we treat TV as an important or even vital public service – which we do at present – or is it to be downgraded to the point where there will always be someone, somewhere, whose service has failed for one reason or another, because that’s just the way it is with broadband.
“The bottom line is that the internet is less reliable.”
Which is why Everyone T.V. (Freely) should include a backup service, like “5G Broadcast”, in its hybrid set-up.
Most people could use a tethered mobile as a Freely backup or just their mobile phone itself.
The internet is a more important service than traditional TV in 2026.
In terms of TV, most of the popular content is on the streaming services – not Freeview.
People have mobile internet as a backup if their home internet connection goes down.
TV was never regarded as ‘vital’. The old establishment of PSB broadcasters will say anything nowadays, to preserve their artificial prominence for as long as possible.