Bread Pitt
Member
Australia's ABC has pushed four free ad-supported channels into LG Channels on webOS this week, no account and no subscription needed. Which ones you get depends entirely on where you live. The UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Singapore get the full set: ABC Entertains for drama and comedy, ABC Everyday for lifestyle, ABC Factual for documentaries and ABC Kids. Canada gets three. The US gets two, Entertains and Kids.
That split is the interesting part. It is not a technical limit, it is rights. Everyday and Factual carry the gardening, cooking, restoration and documentary material that a US network would most likely have already licensed, so those episodes are spoken for. The kids and comedy catalogue is the part nobody else wanted, so that travels.
The other thing that struck me is where a national broadcaster now chooses to land. Not its own app, not a deal with one of the big streamers, but the channel list baked into one manufacturer's TVs. If you own an LG you get it for free. If you own anything else you do not, at least for now, and that is a strange thing for public broadcasting to be gated behind.
Worth remembering these are linear channels, so there is no catalogue to browse and no picking an episode. You watch what is scheduled, ads included.
Has anyone in the UK actually left one of these on? Curious whether ABC Everyday is the gardening and renovation stuff that fills daytime here, or something better than that.
That split is the interesting part. It is not a technical limit, it is rights. Everyday and Factual carry the gardening, cooking, restoration and documentary material that a US network would most likely have already licensed, so those episodes are spoken for. The kids and comedy catalogue is the part nobody else wanted, so that travels.
The other thing that struck me is where a national broadcaster now chooses to land. Not its own app, not a deal with one of the big streamers, but the channel list baked into one manufacturer's TVs. If you own an LG you get it for free. If you own anything else you do not, at least for now, and that is a strange thing for public broadcasting to be gated behind.
Worth remembering these are linear channels, so there is no catalogue to browse and no picking an episode. You watch what is scheduled, ads included.
Has anyone in the UK actually left one of these on? Curious whether ABC Everyday is the gardening and renovation stuff that fills daytime here, or something better than that.
