The T4•R builds on the strengths of the T3•R and T2•R, with more power­ful hard­ware for improved per­form­ance. It intro­duces many new fea­tures while retain­ing the user-friendly inter­face that our cus­tom­ers love, adding sig­ni­fic­antly more flex­ib­il­ity and customisation.

Our blog cov­ers the redesigned TV Guide in Deep Dive #1: Unveil­ing the T4’s redesigned TV Guide, which makes brows­ing and catch­ing up easi­er. Deep Dive #2: Search and dis­cov­er great telly explains how you can quickly find or dis­cov­er new shows. Our next deep dive will cov­er the record­ing and play­back features.

In response to user feed­back, we’ve added a front-pan­el LED that lights up white dur­ing act­ive record­ing. The T4•R also addresses demand for more stor­age, offer­ing 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB options, com­pared to the T3•R’s 1TB limit.

The T4•R needs a rooftop aer­i­al to pick up most live TV and radio chan­nels. We don’t recom­mend using an indoor aer­i­al. You can stream some chan­nels over the inter­net, but they can­not be recorded.

If you don’t have an aer­i­al but do have a satel­lite dish, check out our Man­hat­tan SX Freesat HD Box. It offers access to hun­dreds of TV and radio chan­nels, mak­ing it an excel­lent, budget-friendly altern­at­ive for former Sky subscribers.

The T4•R works per­fectly as a Freeview TV record­er without an inter­net con­nec­tion, and you can use the TV Guide to browse shows for the next sev­en days. How­ever, to access all fea­tures, includ­ing catch-up and on-demand ser­vices, you need to con­nect it to the inter­net. You can eas­ily set it up using Wi-Fi or an Eth­er­net cable for a wired con­nec­tion. Being online also ensures your T4‑R receives the latest soft­ware updates auto­mat­ic­ally. If you choose not to con­nect to the inter­net, you can still down­load updates from our web­site and install them using a USB stick.

Yes, the T4•R allows you to instantly pause and rewind up to the last two hours of the chan­nel you’ve been watching.

With Freeview, you can get over 100 chan­nels, all with no sub­scrip­tion. The exact num­ber of chan­nels you’ll get depends on the cov­er­age at your address. Use the Freeview Chan­nel Check­er to find out the ones avail­able to you.

The T4•R is a Freeview device — it uses your aer­i­al for live TV, not broad­band. If you’re look­ing for Freely, our Man­hat­tan Aero is designed spe­cific­ally for that.

That said, here’s why the T4•R might still be the bet­ter choice for you:

• Record­ing. Freely doesn’t sup­port record­ing at all. The T4•R lets you record pro­grammes to keep forever, skip ads, and watch on your sched­ule — not just when catch-up allows.
• Pause and rewind. The T4•R’s 2‑hour rolling buf­fer means you can pause or rewind live TV on any chan­nel. Freely only offers 15-minute pause.
• No broad­band depend­ency. Your aer­i­al handles the live sig­nal, so even if your inter­net goes down, your TV keeps working.
• Our fourth-gen­er­a­tion TV Guide. Three views (Grid, Chan­nel, Genre), power­ful fil­ters, and uni­ver­sal search of both broad­cast and on-demand pro­grammes – designed to make find­ing what you want genu­inely easy.

If you want Freely’s advant­ages – more HD chan­nels and no aer­i­al needed – the Aero is our product for that. But if record­ing and full con­trol over live TV mat­ter to you, the T4•R remains the best choice.

The T4•R is a sub­scrip­tion-free exper­i­ence that fea­tures You­Tube, BBC iPlay­er, ITVX, 4 (Chan­nel 4), My5, UKTV Play, GREAT! Play­er, Watch Free UK, PBS Amer­ica, POP Play­er, BBC Sounds, STV Play­er, S4C / Clic, and Explore Freeview Play.

We don’t cur­rently include or have plans to include premi­um sub­scrip­tion apps like Net­flix and Prime.

The T4•R can search for any live TV pro­gramme sched­uled with­in the next sev­en days. It also searches for any on-demand and catch-up pro­gramme avail­able from the apps.

When record­ing on two chan­nels, you can still watch, pause, or rewind a third chan­nel, depend­ing on the chan­nels being recor­ded. Here’s how it works:

• If the two record­ing chan­nels are on the same mul­ti­plex, you can watch any oth­er channel.
• If the chan­nels are on two dif­fer­ent mul­ti­plexes, you can only watch chan­nels avail­able on either of these two multiplexes.

A mul­ti­plex is a group of chan­nels broad­cast togeth­er, such as all HD chan­nels. The T4•R allows you to watch a third chan­nel when pos­sible and noti­fies you if you need to stop record­ing to do so. You can also set the T4•R to high­light chan­nels you can’t watch with an icon in the TV Guide and Chan­nel Browser by going to: Set­tings > Menu Pref­er­ences > Flag Unavail­able Chan­nels.

Yes, the T4•R remote can adjust your TV’s volume, turn it on or off, and change its input by learn­ing from your TV’s remote.

Yes, if it’s con­nec­ted to the inter­net through Eth­er­net or Wi-Fi, the T4•R will auto­mat­ic­ally look for updates every night and install them if it finds any. If your T4•R isn’t online, you can update it by down­load­ing the update files onto a USB stick and plug­ging that into the T4•R.

If you’d rather updates didn’t hap­pen on their own, you can turn off Auto­mat­ic Updates. To do this and to manu­ally check for updates, go to: Set­tings > Sys­tem > Soft­ware Updates.

The T4•R is designed to save energy. It uses less than 10W when on, only 0.9W when asleep with Wi-Fi, and just 0.3W with Eth­er­net. It doesn’t have a fan, min­im­ising power use and keep­ing it whis­per quiet.

It also has a fea­ture called Auto Standby. If you don’t press any but­tons on the remote for 3 hours, it will auto­mat­ic­ally go into standby mode. You can adjust or turn off this fea­ture by going to: Set­tings > Sys­tem > Standby Options.