Freely suffered a significant service disruption on Friday 14 August, leaving some viewers unable to watch certain internet-delivered television channels.

The problem produced error code ETV6056, with reports from Freely users saying that some channels continued to work while others failed completely.

Freely subsequently confirmed that it was aware of the problem and said that the underlying issue had been resolved.

The incident, however, raises a much bigger question about the future of television in the UK: what happens if traditional broadcast television eventually disappears and almost everyone depends on the internet for their TV?

Freely confirms ETV6056 problem

Freely’s own help pages now acknowledge the incident.

The company says that some viewers experienced ETV6056 when watching certain internet-delivered channels, and confirms that the underlying issue has now been resolved.

The wording is significant.

This was not necessarily a case of the whole Freely service disappearing. Instead, particular internet-delivered channels were affected, while other channels could continue working.

That explains some of the apparently contradictory reports from viewers.

Some Freely customers reported that BBC channels were still available while other services produced ETV6056. Reports from Freely users also indicated that different devices and channels could behave differently during the incident.

Independent reports appeared on social media and tech forums, including reports from users of Freely Pucks and the Manhattan Aero, with viewers describing channels disappearing or becoming unavailable.

There were also customer reports appearing on Trustpilot on 14 August, including one describing an outage affecting some Freely boxes.

Why could some channels still work?

This is one of the important things to understand about Freely.

Freely isn’t simply another version of traditional Freeview delivered through an aerial.

A significant part of the platform uses internet-delivered television streams.

Freely’s own support documentation makes the distinction very clear. If a television also has an aerial connected, aerial-delivered channels can remain available even when an internet-delivered channel isn’t working.

In other words, a viewer can potentially have:

Aerial TV — working

while at the same time:

Internet-delivered TV — not working

That hybrid approach provides a useful degree of resilience.

But remove the aerial and the situation changes.

This is why yesterday’s outage matters

For someone using Freely today, an outage such as this is an inconvenience.

If the aerial is still connected, there may be a fallback.

But imagine the situation several years from now.

Suppose the UK eventually decides that maintaining the terrestrial television network is no longer worthwhile. Freeview is switched off, and the majority of free television moves to internet delivery.

Satellite television could also decline further as viewers move towards streaming platforms.

At that point, the television infrastructure would look very different.

Instead of:

Aerial → transmitter → television

you increasingly have:

Broadband → internet network → TV platform → broadcaster → television

There are obviously advantages to that model. It allows broadcasters to offer more channels, higher-resolution video, on-demand programming and a much more flexible television service.

But it also creates new points of failure.

And Friday’s Freely outage provided a small-scale demonstration of exactly that.

What if the internet TV platform goes down?

Imagine that terrestrial Freeview no longer exists.

Imagine that a viewer has no satellite dish either.

Their television is connected to the internet and their free TV service is supplied entirely through an IPTV platform.

Then the platform suffers an outage.

There is no aerial signal to fall back on.

There is no satellite signal to fall back on.

The viewer simply loses access to the television service.

That’s very different from a traditional terrestrial broadcasting failure.

The UK has spent decades building a television system based around highly resilient broadcast infrastructure. A single transmitter can serve huge numbers of households without requiring every home to have its own broadband connection.

Internet television changes that relationship.

The viewer becomes dependent on both the internet connection and the services sitting behind it.

And what happens during a wider internet outage?

This is where the debate becomes much more serious.

A television platform outage is one thing.

A regional broadband outage is another.

A major national network problem is something else entirely.

And during an emergency, the distinction becomes particularly important.

Terrestrial broadcasting has historically provided a way of distributing information to very large numbers of people simultaneously, without relying on every individual household maintaining an internet connection.

That resilience is one of the issues now being raised as the UK considers the future of terrestrial television.

The Government has confirmed that Freeview/DTT is secured until at least 2034, but it is now consulting on what happens afterwards. The options being considered include 2034 and 2044 as possible timeframes for a future switch-off. No final decision has yet been made.

The Government has also explicitly acknowledged concerns about affordability, reliability, accessibility and the possibility that households could need broadband to replace terrestrial television.

Freely is already preparing for that future

This isn’t simply a theoretical discussion.

Everyone TV, which operates Freeview, Freesat and Freely, is actively developing Freely as an internet-based television platform.

In June, Everyone TV said its forecasts suggested Freely could be present in 10.5 million UK homes by 2034, while the number of homes without broadband could fall to around 220,000.

Freely has also continued expanding its channel line-up, recently passing 70 live channels.

So the direction of travel is obvious.

More television is moving online.

The question is whether the UK should eventually move all television online.

Friday’s outage is a warning, not a reason to reject Freely

It would be unfair to suggest that one outage proves Freely is unreliable.

Internet services have outages. Broadcasters have outages. Satellite platforms have outages. Even terrestrial television can experience transmitter failures and reception problems.

Freely also resolved Friday’s problem.

The more important issue is redundancy.

Today, a Freely television can potentially have an aerial connected as a backup. Freely itself recommends trying an aerial if an internet-delivered channel isn’t working.

If the aerial network eventually disappears, that backup disappears with it.

And that is the part of the current television debate that deserves much more attention.

The real question isn’t whether Freely is good

Freely is an interesting development in free television. It offers the convenience of streaming while retaining the familiar channel-based television experience.

The question is whether we should eventually make internet connectivity a requirement for free television.

Friday’s ETV6056 incident shows why that deserves careful consideration.

If Freeview disappears, Freesat becomes less important and virtually all free television moves to IP delivery, then a problem somewhere in the internet TV delivery chain could potentially affect millions of viewers at once.

For most people, that might simply mean missing an episode of their favourite programme.

For some households, particularly those relying on television as their main source of news and information, it could be much more significant.

The future of television may well be online. But before the UK switches off the old broadcast infrastructure, it needs to be certain that the new one is not only bigger and more flexible — but at least as resilient.

Friday’s Freely outage was relatively short-lived.

The bigger question is what happens when there is no aerial or satellite fallback left at all.