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Don’t touch that dial: How Freely plans to future-proof the UK’s public broadcasting

When veteran media executive Erik Huggers joined the BBC in 2007, he had some big ideas for the public broadcaster’s still-nascent iPlayer streaming service. What if, Huggers proposed, iPlayer didn’t just aggregate the BBC’s live and on-demand video assets, but also served as the basis for the streaming efforts of the country’s other major public service broadcasters?

Facing headwinds from regulators as well as the BBC’s own trust, his ambitious plans for a federated streaming project ultimately went nowhere. “There's a time and a place for everything, and the timing was simply wrong,” Huggers told me during a Zoom call this week.

However, around a decade and half later, the stars finally seem to be aligning.

This week, the UK’s Everyone TV, a joint venture between the BCC, iTV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, announced a distribution deal with Amazon for Freely, a free online live TV service that launched earlier this year. Crucially, Freely isn’t just another streaming app, but a core part of the live TV viewing experience, positioned to eventually replace broadcast TV altogether, as Everyone TV CEO Jonathan Thompson told me during the same call.

“We control the core live TV experience on our partner devices,” Thompson said. “On a Freely television, we are live TV. When you press the guide button, you launch the Freely guide.”

Getting to this point hasn’t been without challenges. However, both Thompson and Huggers, who serves as the chairman of Everyone TV’s board, believe that it can not only future-proof public broadcasting in the UK, but also serve as a blueprint for other European broadcasters as they’re trying to define their role in a quickly-changing TV landscape.

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