@northshields
YouView came first, and BT got on board with them years ago.
Freeview+ would never have happened if YouView hadn’t been intransigent, and deaf to the requests from the broadcasters, who anyway didn’t want to sully the Freeview name with the paid services that BT, and later TalkTalk, were using the YouView platform for.
Hence the initiative for a platform the broadcasters had better control over, free from the rather doctrinaire ‘this is what we do and this is how we do it’ that YouView have always promulgated. Most especially over padding, for instance, though there are a lot of other examples, like showing 4:3 programmes with black bars each side in 16:9 (good) but never allowing Stretchyvision (bad) and worse, removing the information that the programme had once been 4:3, which the DBook recommended be preserved, so that aware TVs could handle the signal how the viewer wanted it, and not how YouView said it should be.
So I don’t think the broadcasters would have allowed BT to join Freeview+, even if BT had wanted to. And BT, after BT Vision, didn’t want to go it alone with its own platform again.
So, as we have seen, when YouView want to give you medicine, BT has to suck it up 😢
The EETV Apple TV box neatly sidesteps the padding problem by not recording at all, as does Sky Stream, BT’s nascent third attempt at bringing us nearly, but not quite, what we want.
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*** Longtime YouView box owner, BT Broadband customer, finally an EE TV subscriber ***
