What do people think of the Freeview app, or the the function of the service on Freeview enabled devices? Please share your thoughts below.
Thumbs down.
TV is Freeview-enabled but only ABC and SBS work. (TV purchased this year.)
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We find FreeviewPlus slow and cumbersome. We trend to use the TV’s ETV guide and the individual station apps. As outlined elsewhere, the FreeviewPlus (or red button) has different content to some of the apps (SBS is one example).
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Freeview WHAT? Ahhhhhh!
What a crock! All the adds on TV with the overly bright dog and dumb neighbours is never going to help if the service simply does not work.
Our slightly old 2016 Sony only recently started responding to the coloured buttons on the remote some of the time. ABC and SBS only! Simultaneously the TV decided we needed to be Google-fied to access or use any of the apps on the Smart TV menu or go away and pretend we had a dumb TV. Go figure?
The later is nothing to do with FreeView, but worthy of note.
Our latest 2019 kitchen side TV we have not bothered to even link to the internet. It has a Fetch for more mundane things, and being cheap the smart TV functions appear to be driven by a 1910 version of Android. It boots with the pace of Kogan $99 tablet device. Why a cheap TV? Being in the eating corner of the kitchen the Choice was either a TV that was smallish and the ability to open or look out the window, or adopt a pop up theatre with snack bar attached look to match the $2M home Reno Show paradigm so essential in every home these days. (Read the last remark or whole of comment with saracsim and grumpiness emphasis for best effect.)
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This may be due to where you live. The commercial broadcasters don’t offer catch-up services everywhere.
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Ever where they do, they often don’t. Over time we found FreeviewPlus unreliable enough re content and operation re programs we wanted to watch that the spousal unit (apologies for the engineering term, but it seems appropriate in context) acquired enough kit to record 18 programs at once just in case she wants to watch something she missed. Every few days she has a deleteathon.
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I don’t use it often, but recently my wife asked if we could turn on the closed captions for The Handmaid’s Tale. I couldn’t do that as I had recorded it on our Humax PVR. So we watched it on SBS On-Demand instead.
SBS On-Demand requires your device to be registered for certain content, so we tend to use it through our PVR rather than through our Samsung TV.
Have also used ABC iView, but can’t remember ever using any of the commercial networks’ catch-up…
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That only explains part of it.
There may be other things that explain the rest … 
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I honestly cannot see the point of Freeview. I don’t have any Freeview enabled devices, but as far as the app goes, on AppleTV, and on iOS devices, it simply sends you to the particular channel’s app anyway. Waste of space and waste of time. I deleted it after 10 minutes.
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I signed up for channel 9 and 10 on the internet (PC) then logged in on the TV and now it remembers me. With Ch10 you have to “prove” you live in Australia - it wouldn’t work when I signed up with gmail but it was fine with optusnet.
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Yes, that was the approach that we took with SBS. It’s a small amount of one-off hassle but not that big a deal.
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It doesn’t work on our Hisense TV. SBS On Demand and ABC iview are excellent.
I live in Canberra
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I find it very frustrating to use and what really annoys me is the date the episode was aired is not given. Instead we get a season & episode number! That’s next to useless for me!
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We hardly use it. We’ve used it a couple of times for ABC and I set it up for SBS but it now doesn’t work on our TV. There is nothing on commercial channels worth watching.
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That can be tricky to deal with. I find myself rummaging through Wikipedia / IMDB trying to match episodes, to work out which one I missed (rather than viewing the first X minutes of each one).
That said, I can understand why the “air date” is not given - because the “air date” is not well-defined. It may air on somewhat different dates between states and between channels, within the one network. It may not air when it was intended to air, if the program is pre-empted by some special event.
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From memory, the iView (ABC) and OnDemand (SBS) apps do provide date that the program was aired on these stations. The apps also provide information on when the program will expire (be removed from the streaming service).
I can’t recall if the same exists in the Nine, Seven or Ten apps. Maybe other use these ones more than us and can provide details.
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Since neither 7, 9 nor 10 work at all for me (on Freeview), I can’t provide any answers for you on that. LOL.
Do you routinely check whether the air date that ABC and SBS are giving you is actually correct? 
I would imagine that the expiry X days from air date is a condition set by the copyright owner.
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Yes, because we often use this to determine which episode we have missed (we mainly watch factual/doco/UK gritty drama type shows rather than unreality TV or sitcoms). The dates are accurate.
Thanks my understanding as well…part of the broadcast/streaming agreements/licence with the owner…yes this is the case…
The expiry date is also useful if one has a number to watch as it gives an idea of timeframes to watch it before it disappears.
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Keep seeing it advertised but still have no idea exactly what it is. I know I could use google to find out but why? I only watch the abc and sbs so why bother.
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