Ofcom has this week issued new broadcasting licences for two standalone hybrid streaming services.
- Euronews and Trace Music set to become directly available from the Freeview TV Guide.
Freeview and Freely users look set to be able to find Euronews and Trace Music directly from the main TV guide in the near future.
Ofcom data service licences for digital terrestrial TV have been granted this week to hybrid streaming service provider Synapse TV on behalf of both broadcasters.
This means that Euronews will soon join rivals Al Jazeera and France 24 in Freeview’s hybrid streaming section of the TV Guide, which is located in the 250-299 channel range. Euronews, which recently returned to profit after a troubled few years, was originally set up in the 1990s to counter the then US-dominated international TV news market.
Meanwhile, Trace Music, which exited Sky a couple of years ago, will have a direct presence on Freeview, joining the various streaming platforms its channels have since appeared on.
Hybrid streaming services are available on compatible internet connected Freeview and Freely TVs. The hybrid element means TVs need to be connected to both a TV aerial and an internet connection.
Both channels currently hidden away on Freeview
Euronews and Trace Music are already found inside the Channelbox portal on Freeview 271 and Freely channel 561. That means that viewers will only know these channels are available if they enter and navigate through the portal to find them, effectively making them hidden away to many viewers.
Channelbox has acted as an incubator for channels wanting to try out reaching Freeview viewers, with a number of its services going on to launch standalone services.
That also works the other way: for example, Extreme Sports and GINX eSports TV recently abandoned their standalone slots in favour of being distributed inside Channelbox.
However, becoming available as a direct standalone service increases visibility on the channel list. It allows broadcasters to offer a full TV guide and easier access to the live streams of the channels.
▶️ Explainer: why are hybrid streaming channels so popular?
There’s been a rapid growth in hybrid streaming channels on Freeview in recent years. That resulted in the company that oversees the Freeview platform – Everyone TV – rejigging the channel guide last year to make space for them all.
Broadcasters can offer hybrid streaming services at a fraction of the price of a regular digital terrestrial broadcast channel. That’s because a hybrid streaming channel only requires a small chunk of bandwidth on one of the Freeview multiplexes. The data sent over the airwaves is an app that directs TVs to the relevant channel stream.
A regular broadcast channel which is fully broadcast over the airwaves would require a much larger chunk of bandwidth, which costs more to rent out from one of Freeview’s multiplex operators.
These channels are also available on Freely smart TVs. However, in a bid to encourage channels to move away from hybrid streaming, Freely’s TV guide shunts these channels much further down the list, below channel 550. Freely will assign full streaming channels (i.e. channels that can be fully streamed via wi-fi/ethernet and don’t need an aerial) more preferencial slots higher up the channel list.
By: Marc Thornham | image: DTV Services Ltd