Freely says that it has reached over half a million weekly users in the United Kingdom in more than a year since it launched, which it describes as a significant milestone. They threw a party to celebrate, but what do the numbers really mean?
Freely launched on Hisense smart televisions in Apil 2024. It is now available as an operator app on a growing number of television brands, including Bush, Toshiba, Sharp, Panasonic, Philips, JVC, TCL, and Panasonic, plus Amazon Fire TV, TiVo, and Roku platforms. As yet, the two leading television brands, Samsung and LG, have yet to back the Freely platform, preferring to promote their own systems.
So, what does half a million users a week mean? Notably, Everyone TV, the consortium of British broadcasters behind Freely, has not said anything about the number of Freely televisions sold or the number of households that have Freely, which would be key metrics.
The number of users a week could be taken to mean households, but as Freely supports multiple user profiles on each television, the number of homes could be less than half a million.
There are about 27.5 million television households in the United Kingdom and over half of them have more than one television, and about 7 out of 10 of them have more than one person in the household.
Half a million represents less than 2% of households in the country. Compare that to around 28% that have services from Sky.
For comparison, Freeview reached 5 million homes within 26 months of its launch at the end of October 2002. Freeview Play launched in 2015 and passed 5 million televisions sold within three years.
We estimate that around 6 to 8 million televisions are sold in the United Kingdom each year, which puts the Freely numbers in perspective.
Freely claims it will be the biggest television platform in the country within the next five years, providing the primary platform in the majority of homes by 2030. That suggests it is expected to reach a penetration of more than 50% by then, or around 13 million homes. Clearly it has some way to go to achieve that.
Half a million users a week represents a reach figure. It does not say anything about how much or how often those users are watching a week.
We are told that the largest proportion of users are aged 16-34, an age group that generally watches less television than average.
According to Everyone TV, over two-thirds of users are watching Freely solely over an internet connection, which is after all the main selling proposition of the platform. It suggests that a third of users are for whatever reason not exclusively using the channels that are available online through Freely.
“With the majority of our users streaming-only, it shows that Freely is accomplishing what we set out to do — provide an easy and simple way for audiences to enjoy their favourite free TV shows all in one place as viewing habits shift,” said Jonathan Thompson, the chief executive of Everyone TV.”