@Eskimosony
You would be surprised how often users of Sony TVs posting here can’t, or don’t want to, use a terrestrial aerial. I know I was, at first.
We get them on the YouView Community as well, where the requirement to use an aerial, at least initially, to tune in the terrestrial channels in order to get the Players still applies.
But to pooh-pooh people without a terrestrial aerial is old thinking; it might have made sense in the days before smart TVs, when there wasn’t much you could do with the TV without one, but it doesn’t make sense now.
The first smart TVs rather clung to the old thinking a bit, where they still came on showing the last terrestrial channel you watched, and ‘Smart’ was a button you had to press to get to the smart features, just as AV was a button you had to press to get to the connected devices.
But no longer; just look at the main menu on any modern TV, where live terrestrial TV is often no longer given pride of place, let alone being the default option, and is just one of a plethora of menu options among the smart apps and the device ports you are offered.
So yes, you can perfectly well use a TV as a monitor; and why get the apps, etc., from a separate device, when you can have them built in?
The second thing I have learned being on here is that your lovingly hand-crafted advice is likely to be met with any one of a number of degrees of gratitude or ingratitude, from effusive thanks through qualified acceptance, stony silence, complaint, disbelief and denial to actual outrage, and you must not take it personally.
In fact, treat it as a learning experience; it’s amazing how many possible solutions can be found, especially if you listen to the OP. In this case, the OP thought he ought to be able to have a set of Players each of which offered a live option for its channels. And indeed, the Roku devices offer this.
But it’s unpredictable; somebody else might find switching from Player to Player a right faff, compared to just changing channels, something that TVPlay comes close to offering, though the Holy Grail here would be a full Freeview EPG that tapped into all the Freeview channels, but internet-delivered.
I think we are going to get this for the big five broadcasters, the ones who already offer all their channels over the internet, soonish, as evinced by Arqiva distancing itself from them. I guess when you run all the terrestrial transmitters, with all their different coverage limitations, you see only downsides to them being replaced by IP channels 😢
But my mantra, regarding the advice I give here, is that it is worth every penny the recipient is paying for it; and so, nothing lost if they don’t accept it. Except the recipient gets to keep their problem. Which they do anyway, if the advice I give doesn’t work 😛
My favourite bedtime reading is a Sony product manual…
