Freely TV
How the UK's four public service broadcasters built a single home for live and on-demand TV, and how I shaped one of its core features under a deadline that could not move.
A national, broadcaster-backed streaming platform, launched on a fixed manufacturing deadline. I worked across many areas of Freely, and one decision shows how I operate: I owned the live TV Guide and pushed it past a bare-minimum MVP into something viewers would actually expect.
Freely was a fresh, zero-to-one idea: the first time the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 (through their joint venture, Everyone TV) had come together behind one streaming proposition.
The bet was the shift from traditional aerial TV (DTT) to live and on-demand TV over the internet (IP), built straight into new smart TVs from Hisense and Vestel. Because TV manufacturing cycles are fixed, the launch date could not move. Miss it, and the product would wait a year for the next model run.
British public service broadcasting was under real pressure from the global streamers. To hold and grow their audience, the broadcasters needed a unified, prominent home on the television itself, not another app buried in a menu.
The question under 'build a streaming app' was simple to ask and hard to answer: can UK broadcasters own the default live-TV experience on the TV set, on a timeline they do not control?
I owned the live TV Guide, a core part of the experience. The cautious plan was to rebuild a stripped-down version of an older Guide from scratch. I believed we could do better without adding risk, so I set out to test that rather than assert it.
I worked the decision from a few angles:
- With engineering, weighing reuse of a more modern Guide against a from-scratch rebuild
- With design, surfacing any hidden complexity in each option
- With a manager outside the project, pressure-testing the analysis for blind spots
A key insight emerged: the 'simple' rebuild actually needed one genuinely complex component that the modern version avoided entirely. So the bolder option was not slower. It was arguably safer, and far more valuable to viewers. With that grounded, I aligned design, engineering and senior leadership behind shipping the better Guide on the same deadline.
A modern, image-led live TV Guide that became a core part of the Freely launch experience. It lets viewers browse and discover live content the way they expect from a current streaming product, not a legacy programme grid.
Freely launched on time in Q2 2024 across Hisense and Vestel smart TVs, with TiVo to follow: the first unified streaming home from all four UK public service broadcasters.
The Guide shipped as the richer, more modern version rather than the bare minimum the timeline seemed to demand.
The bold option is often the safe one, once you actually size the work instead of guessing. I bring that reuse-versus-rebuild rigour, and the habit of pressure-testing a recommendation before defending it, to every problem I take on.
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