Where are iPlayer and ITV hub apps on new A90J 2021 OLEDs?

[Toadio]

All the common UK catchup tv apps appear to be missing for the tv and they cannot be installed from google play store.. spec clearly states YouView support and specifically iPlayer.. surely i cant be the only one that has noticed these are not there?!

[Moanygit]

To be fair to John Lewis, their website does state that the uk players aren't available.

I, however, bought it in store, not online, and there was nothing on the display or from the sales guy to suggest these weren't available. 

[GenericUserName]

@Moanygit That's the complete opposite to the attitude I got from the manager at curry's.

He stated that (paraphrasing) "Well since you bought on store you can see that the TV is on display, if you had really wanted you could have checked the app store and found out then" while going to the apps section with the remote on the display model. 

Yeah, because I'm going to stand there (with a long-term leg injury) for a few hours with the remote checking to see what apps are and aren't available on the TV and the people working there wouldn't tell me to make up my mind or move on after ten minutes doing so because it's black Friday and they want the TV in demo mode, not somebody fiddling around with around the one of two (different sized) demo models playing around in the app store to see what's available. They got a bit confused and impatient when I bought the thing because I spent maybe two or three minutes checking out the operating system so I could compare it to the older LG OS I was used to. 

That's the level of petty he was. Nobody goes through every app on a demo model, I've never seen someone do it or heard of anyone doing it in my life. I assume staff would find it pretty disruptive too as you're making potential shoppers look at other TVs and considering that it was the highest priced 55" set there (marked down £200 so equal to LG's entry) I think I would have been told to read the spec sheet rather than play with the TV.

The spec sheet has a disclaimer at one part saying that [b] some [/b] catch up services will be available in 2021, then it lists all of the 5 catch up services as being available so long as you're in the UK.

John Lewis might give you an okay firestick with 4K compatibility and Atmos/DTS X. They do seem more reasonable than my retailer. 

[Ian_m-K]

SONY UK, your support just sucks! I keep being told the my TV is fine and ready for the apps. They just aren't available and 'should' be in 2021. There's not much of 2021 left! Surely by now you must know what's happening and if/when they will be avialable or are you going to continue to mug your customers into 2022, with a similar message just change 2021 to 2022! I really wish I'd bought LG now!

[HannahEd01]

Hey guys, this issue has been going on for a while now (almost a year) and the same response has been always delivered by Sony. They actually did solve it for the W800 series, so maybe they will for these as well? They better do. All I know for sure is that BBC is did a trick on many companies when the time came to sign the papers :s

[nepunch]

But....just over 17 days left of 2021............?

Perhaps we are looking at some sort of miracle on the 25th....?

[copyrightimage]

Well that made me laugh!

[Umbugnet]

Sony is not behaving in a manner that might be reasonably expected of a premium brand. They knew that the missing catch-up TV services would be important to UK customers. They must also have known that anyone "upgrading" from an earlier Bravia that had these features would expect to see them (and more) in their new Bravia. That's the point of upgrading...to enhance the utility you currently have.

Sony deny culpability on two fronts:

1) Consumer law. They state that they are the manufacturer and not the retailer. However, the basis for consumers feeling wronged in this case is that the product they purchased did not match what the marketing described. Who markets these TVs? Both retailer and manufacturer but it is material presented by the manufacturer that has included imagery of the BBC iPlayer as a feature of these Bravia models. So Sony knowingly marketed a feature that their product did not have. 

2) In their copy and paste responses to queries, they have been saying that the TVs have the features and that they just need to be enabled by a software update. How is that any kind of mitigation? Catch-up TV is either a usable feature or it isn't. It really doesn't matter what the reason for its lack of availability is in this context. In this context, the absence of a feature that their own earlier marketing had indicated was present might as well be a fault from the consumer's perspective. 

Sony wants people to pay a premium price for its products. Part of the reason people do so is because they trust the name. Their cynical approach to this very real problem (lack of communication and lack of transparency when approached for information and their attempts to deflect accusations of breaches of UK consumer law) actually makes Sony seem more like some dubious budget - brand that you might take risks with for a cheap and cheerful TV. 

[GenericUserName]

@Umbugnet

Got the reverse attitude from my retailer, that it was sonys fault and not their fault that their site contained advertisements saying that they were selling said item. Pretty dismissive too, you can see my above post for it in detail.

Thing is this thread is fast turning into the online equivalent of people with torches and pitchforks and not a single Sony worker has showed up to say "Yes there will definitely be an update in 2021"

Sony also offer Bravia Core. When PSN (back when PSN was free) went down for a staggering three days due to outside influences (a DDOS attack in retaliation to Sony suing people for modding their PS3s to run custom firmware) they offered everyone on PSN (not just those who claimed to be affected) one or two free games.

With the fact that Bravia core has a selection of streaming and movies (you get some freebies with the TV) the smart move by Sony would be to make a response and set up a system where owners of the TV get some form of comisseration (a number of free movies every month as well as extra free months of streaming) with the number of movies and extra months of streaming being directly proportional to when a TV was bought. That would ensure that people who have waited months on end get a fair deal.

That proposal isn't even me saying "I want lots of free stuff" it's "I want Sony to give the people worse affected lots of free stuff to make up for it while since I've only owned the TV for a few weeks the amount of free stuff I would recieve would be minimal", provided the update comes out within a month.

I've seen forum dumpster fires like this before, mainly on Steam and they usually end up getting so out of hand that the creators of the game close the thread and delete any new ones, as such people take to all corners of the Internet to badmouth said devs.

The ones that haven't ended up like this are ones where the developer responds with "We know you have a grievance and trust us we are working as hard as possible to fix the situation and hope to have an update out by <month>" that usually quells the masses in my experience.

If a Sony rep doesn't respond I can see lots of angry people who bought their TV in 2021 with "Feature available in 2021" taking them back to their retailers, who are then going to cause an even bigger headache than a few angry people on a forum.

In other words, Sony, please get in here and say something. 

[Bat_Rick]

I got my self an amazon firestick as a temporary solution, until i hear any further update from Sony :(.

This has been going on for sometime now.

[joepineapples901]

I've contacted them a couple more times through live chat over the past few weeks.  First response was that 'their engineers are working on it'.  Which I guess you could interpret as the license agreements have been sorted and now they're busy bug testing the software updates.  I don't want to give false hope though, since this is just my (possible?) interpretation.

The second response was the usual 2021.  When I pushed him, he said they couldn't guarantee that (big shocker).