Freely Streaming Boxes

timo_w2s said:
An update from Manhattan:

"We’ve been stunned by the popularity of Aero in its first 2 weeks

But fear not: a large amount of new stock is on its way and will be available by the end of March. We apologise for the inconvenience in the meantime."

manhattan-tv.com

Aero Availability

Enjoy the best of British TV, all for free, with our award-winning Freeview and Freesat TV boxes and recorders.
manhattan-tv.com
Click to expand...
Must've been my post on Monday.
 
@timo_w2s My neighbour took delivery of mine yesterday - let's hope he doesn't get any ideas. .......
 
timo_w2s said:
Purely for educational purposes, I'm going to try taking a box to Finland and see if it works over a VPN connection.

Apart from requiring quite a fast connection, I can see two other reasons it might not work. In theory, they could use wifi to geolocate the device or even look at the connection to see if it's coming via a VPN tunnel. Amazon stick's don't do that but maybe Freely is going to be a bit more fussy.

I did test how the boxes behave with the less than 10Mbps connection that they recommend by throttling the bandwidth to the device in my router. I found that if I dropped the speed down below 5Mbps the HD channels reverted to SD quality and by about 4 - 3.5Mbps there was frequent random pauses to the audio and video.
Click to expand...
will you have to set up the VPN on the router? does this cause problems for the rest of your internet?
 
Pride Of Cucamonga said:
will you have to set up the VPN on the router? does this cause problems for the rest of your internet?
Click to expand...
Yes, it needs to be on the router as the Aero doesn't let you install any VPN apps. I haven't actually tried it yet as I'm still in the UK but I do stream Fire TV sticks and Vu+ boxes over the VPN with no problems.

I don't use a commercial VPN provider as on my and my parents' routers in Finland I route specific devices via the VPN back to my UK home internet connection. The rest of the devices in Finland can access the internet via a Finnish IP address as normal.
 
timo_w2s said:
Yes, it needs to be on the router as the Aero doesn't let you install any VPN apps. I haven't actually tried it yet as I'm still in the UK but I do stream Fire TV sticks and Vu+ boxes over the VPN with no problems.

I don't use a commercial VPN provider as on my and my parents' routers in Finland I route specific devices via the VPN back to my UK home internet connection. The rest of the devices in Finland can access the internet via a Finnish IP address as normal.
Click to expand...
ooh that's clever - is it based on IP address or MAC?
 
Interesting post on an installers group, a few, after taking down aerials for people who were going Freely, have then reinstalled when the customer realised that they needed the aerial to record.:)
 
rolfw said:
Interesting post on an installers group, a few, after taking down aerials for people who were going Freely, have then reinstalled when the customer realised that they needed the aerial to record.:)
Click to expand...
Same problem with Sky Stream...
 
Pride Of Cucamonga said:
ooh that's clever - is it based on IP address or MAC?
Click to expand...
In the routers I use (Draytek) you can bind an IP address to the MAC address of the device which saves messing about assigning static IP addresses in each device. I then tell the router that all traffic to that particular local IP (or range of IPs) needs to go via the VPN tunnel.
 
rolfw said:
Interesting post on an installers group, a few, after taking down aerials for people who were going Freely, have then reinstalled when the customer realised that they needed the aerial to record.:)
Click to expand...


Aye, people don't do their research. Still have my Mk 1 Humax HDR for recording.
 
rolfw said:
Interesting post on an installers group, a few, after taking down aerials for people who were going Freely, have then reinstalled when the customer realised that they needed the aerial to record.:)
Click to expand...

Yep.. there you go.
Client didn't realise until after they had purchased the recorder.
 

Attachments

  • 641646763_2777735889243214_167708175061096974_n.webp
    641646763_2777735889243214_167708175061096974_n.webp
    279.7 KB · Views: 26
  • 642733754_2777735925909877_590674174215497631_n.webp
    642733754_2777735925909877_590674174215497631_n.webp
    206 KB · Views: 25
Got back from holiday, recovered the Aero from my neighbour and had a good play with it.

Fast, instinctive and very useful - I particularly like the Voice Command feature which saves a heap of time finding stuff on catch-up.
 
Regarding license fee for having a TV in Sweden and some other countries the system with an annual license fee was cancelled some years ago.

Since more and more people don't have a TV set to watch the programs but use a tablet, phone or computer instead a new system called public service fee was introduced.

This means everyone in a household with an income from employment or retirement has to pay 1 % of the net income in public service fee.
However there is a maximum of 1 184:- SEK to pay per person 2026. This amount changes every year.

If you only have an income from capital (interest, shares, properties) you don't have to pay the fee.

This is to pay for SVT, SR and UR (the Swedish public service).
Meaning you have to pay even if you don't watch or listen to the public service channels at all.
 
Nalleman said:
Regarding license fee for having a TV in Sweden and some other countries the system with an annual license fee was cancelled some years ago.

Since more and more people don't have a TV set to watch the programs but use a tablet, phone or computer instead a new system called public service fee was introduced.

This means everyone in a household with an income from employment or retirement has to pay 1 % of the net income in public service fee.
However there is a maximum of 1 184:- SEK to pay per person 2026. This amount changes every year.

If you only have an income from capital (interest, shares, properties) you don't have to pay the fee.

This is to pay for SVT, SR and UR (the Swedish public service).
Meaning you have to pay even if you don't watch or listen to the public service channels at all.
Click to expand...
I think it's very similar in Finland. They scrapped the TV license about 10 years ago and now a "media fee" is included in your tax. It's good news for me as I don't officially live or pay tax in Finland at the moment (I still live in the UK for the majority of the year) so I no longer have to buy a TV license for my property in Finland but it's not so good for my sister's family who lives in Finland full time as she and her husband now both have to pay the fee (rather than just a single household licence fee).
 
rolfw said:
Interesting post on an installers group, a few, after taking down aerials for people who were going Freely, have then reinstalled when the customer realised that they needed the aerial to record.:)
Click to expand...
I was watching a FAST channel and instinctively tried to hit pause and of course it didn't work. highly regressive in my opinion
 
Pride Of Cucamonga said:
I was watching a FAST channel and instinctively tried to hit pause and of course it didn't work. highly regressive in my opinion
Click to expand...


On the Manhattan Aero Freely box, which was the starting point for rhis thread, you can indeed pause - for up to fifteen minutes. I have tried the box rigourously over two days now and it is proving to be an excellent buy for those of us with poor or non-existent DTT.
 
In Estonia it is even easier. The national broadcaster is financed directly from the state budget. Individuals and companies do not have to pay anything extra. This saves on tax collection costs.
Advertising is prohibited on national broadcasting, except for plain sponsorship information for major competitions.

Only place where the people pay is the cost of their telephone vote for the national preliminary rounds of the Eurovision Song Contest to select Estonia's representative.
 
Lazarus said:
On the Manhattan Aero Freely box, which was the starting point for rhis thread, you can indeed pause - for up to fifteen minutes. I have tried the box rigourously over two days now and it is proving to be an excellent buy for those of us with poor or non-existent DTT.
Click to expand...
Can you fast forward through adverts on a paused section?
 
Back
Top