A Freely outage knocked out most channels, and some viewers still need a factory reset
If your telly spent the back half of last week showing black screens where ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 used to be, the problem was not your broadband. Freely, the free TV service that arrives down your internet connection rather than through an aerial, lost a large slice of its channels from Thursday afternoon until Friday evening. Viewers who were caught by it got an error code, ETV6056, and not much else.
Freely is run by Everyone TV, the organisation behind Freeview and Freesat, which is jointly owned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. The outage was reported by ISPreview and by Cord Busters, which agree on the shape of it. The BBC channels carried on working throughout, neither outlet can say why, and it did not hit everybody. Plenty of people noticed nothing at all.
Everyone TV says the underlying fault is fixed. The awkward part is the recovery. For some viewers the channels do not come back on their own, and the advice is a factory reset, which clears what the device has saved: your app logins, your settings, anything stored on it. Everyone TV has since warned that even after a reset the problem can return if you press restart on a channel or open one of the player apps. So the fix holds, as long as you use the box more narrowly than you bought it for.
Which device you own decided how much this stung. The two standalone boxes confirmed as affected, Netgem’s Pleio and Manhattan’s Aero, are broadband-only, with no aerial to fall back on. A lot of televisions with Freely built in also carry Freeview, so those households could switch across and wait it out. Whether any built-in sets were caught up in it is still unclear.
None of this was fixable at your end. There was no fault on your line to go hunting for. If your connection has genuinely been flaky as well, then whether it is your wifi or your line is the place to start, and live TV needs less speed than most people assume, which what speed you actually need goes through.
It matters beyond one bad weekend because more of the house keeps moving onto that one line. The landline has already gone that way, and ISPreview notes the government has floated switching off terrestrial TV signals in either 2034 or 2044. A day and a half of black screens is a small thing on its own. Worth noticing anyway. Once the aerial is gone, a broadband fault takes the telly with it. To see which networks can reach your address, start with the availability checker.