How to watch on demand TV without YouView

[akerbeltz]

Brand new Sony Bravia KD55X850C (after having ditched the Samsung which was incapble of maintaining a WiFi connection and then started giving us blackscreens).

Here's an interesting conundrum we've run into - it would appear that the only way of changing the order of chanells on the Bravia is to disable YouView. Fair enough. Not so fair enough the time-consuming way you are forced into to move the channels around but I'll leave that aside for another time. Including the question of why anyone would put the HD channels right at the end, way behind the non-HD channels...

Anyway. In a bizarre twist, it would seem that the on-demand apps do not behave in the same way. iPlayer and Channel 5 on demand still work as you'd expect. But ITV and 4OD bring up a screen asking me to activate YouView again. So my question are:

1. Is it really the case that ITV and 4OD require YouView but not iPlayer and 5OD? If not, how do I get around that?

2. If I re-activate YouView, will it preserve the custom channel order?

The custom channel order is a red line for us and I'm kind of loathe to experiment because it took almost 2 hours to redo the list.

Anyone know?

[royabrown · Accepted solution]

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@akerbeltz wrote:

Brand new Sony Bravia KD55X850C (after having ditched the Samsung which was incapble of maintaining a WiFi connection and then started giving us black screens).

Here's an interesting conundrum we've run into - it would appear that the only way of changing the order of chanells on the Bravia is to disable YouView. Fair enough. Not so fair enough the time-consuming way you are forced into to move the channels around but I'll leave that aside for another time. Including the question of why anyone would put the HD channels right at the end, way behind the non-HD channels...

Anyway. In a bizarre twist, it would seem that the on-demand apps do not behave in the same way. iPlayer and Channel 5 on demand still work as you'd expect. But ITV and 4OD bring up a screen asking me to activate YouView again. So my question are:

1. Is it really the case that ITV and 4OD require YouView but not iPlayer and 5OD? If not, how do I get around that?

2. If I re-activate YouView, will it preserve the custom channel order?

The custom channel order is a red line for us and I'm kind of loathe to experiment because it took almost 2 hours to redo the list.

Anyone know?

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1. Yes. As with most of their products, Sony provide only the BBC iPlayer and My5 (as it is now called) natively, and you should regard the ITV Hub and All4 as bonuses provided by the YouView interface. And there is no way round it that I know of.

2. Yes it will, as long as when returning to YouView you Skip the proffered channel retune step.

Additionally, there is all sorts of good stuff about these sets and YouView here, albeit written from the point of view of how YouView on the sets differs from YouView on a YouView box. It had got a little out of date, so I have now refreshed it.

For instance, to cover that you can now record on the Freeview side, though still not on the YouView side as of now (and possibly not ever, as I suspect it's a footprint thing).

[akerbeltz]

That's smashin, royabrown, many thanks! Not so worried about the recording but having to go back to the weird EPG order would have been a pain.

Devs don't really surprise me that much these days when it comes to user unfriendliness but it does seem a bit OTT to have to go to this extent to re-order channels - just in case someone from Sony reads this