Thanks for taking the time to respond Midnight. What you say seems to support what I'd already come to believe, but it's good to have confirmation, rather than the endless speculation on my part. Curiously, neither the Freeview or EE TV agents I spoke with today were able to offer much in the way of clarity.
So I guess we wait until EE adopts the new standards or upgrades its firmware to account for both types. Or, how's this for revolution, all broadcasters use one format only?
Either way, I won't be holding my breath.
Thanks for clarifying
HbbTV is the new standard, and MHEG the old one, and Freeview is trying, without much success it seems, to bring about the revolution you describe.
YouView never had MHEG, right from the start 12 years ago, so I can’t see them moving to add it now. As with Accurate Recording, YouView have always prized being technically ‘in the right’ over providing what people actually want and need 😢
The channels that use HbbTV do work. 263 and 265.
It’s the ones that use the older MHEG standard that don’t work, and this is by design, as YouView and Freeview both wait in vain for the owners of these channels to move to HbbTV 😢
Like at least some of the other streaming channels in the 251-299 range channels 263 and 265 are setup to use either HbbTV or MHEG-IC . For a box to use either it has to have suitable code to pick up the hook and use it.
It's now been 30 months since it was announced that all these channels now included at least HbbTV.
One example of that announcement still around is https://rxtvinfo.com/2022/freeview-ip-channels-complete-hbbtv-rollout/
I think it was DigitalUK that had a list of what was included for each channel, but they never kept it up to date with their own announcements , which no doubt caused some confusion, and eventually got scrubbed, with no transfer to the everyone, (or freeview), site of that page.
@Midnight_Voice Will be interesting to see whether these old MHEG-IC channels are supported by Freely...