Everyone TV: Freely offers ‘best option for live TV’ in streaming age

Freely is “built on the spirit of collaboration” in partnership with global TV manufacturers to “offer the best way of watching live TV in the streaming age,” according to Jonathan Thompson, CEO of Everyone TV, the outfit leading the development of the UK’s new hybrid free-to-view platform.

Jonathan Thompson

Live, he said, is one of the key differentiators between broadcasters and their competitors.

Beyond, this, he said, Freely is designed to secure the future of TV in the streaming age.

“This will be the start of our next chapter,” he said.

Speaking at the Outside the Box 2024 event in London this morning, Thompson said that his meetings with other European broadcasters showed that the latter still looked to the UK as “the gold standard”.

Thompson said the TV business has to “stop asking who will own the viewer of the future”. There is, he says, a need for collaboration.

He said that streaming, new formats and AI are global phenomena. While British TV has “so many strengths”, it has to “shape the global future rather than stand separate from it”.

Neverthless, British broadcasters have to focus on serving their domestic audience. To survive, the need to think about “connection”, he said.

“It is TV that connects us to what we already have in common,” he said.

The TV industry has been subject to “a gold rush” that is now slowing with an ongoing impact on the streamers that have rushed to stake their claims, said Thompson.

Thompson said that there is “a need for a new approach” characterised by “permanent innovation”.

Thompson said that the series Traitors and the drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office had in different ways had an exceptional impact and “captured the national mood” within a TV ecosystem that sometimes seems like “the largest shopping mall in the world”.