Knowledge Base

What is Freeview Play Channel Management and why do BBC HD channels appear twice in my channel list?

You may have noticed that BBC HD chan­nels, such as BBC One HD, appear twice in your chan­nel list. This is because your short-mod­el is required to use a new fea­ture called Freeview Play Chan­nel Man­age­ment when con­nec­ted to the internet.

Here’s what Freeview Play Chan­nel Man­age­ment does:

  1. Man­ages chan­nel num­bers: Freeview Play alloc­ates chan­nel num­bers based on your loc­a­tion, avail­able trans­mit­ters, and any region­al con­flicts. It handles this auto­mat­ic­ally through the Freeview Play server.

  2. HD chan­nel swap­ping: For example, you will see BBC One HD on both chan­nel 1 and 101, with BBC One SD mov­ing to chan­nel 611. This change is part of Freeview’s plan to make HD chan­nels more prom­in­ent. BBC chan­nels are the first to do this and oth­er broad­casters may follow.

  3. Inter­net chan­nels: Without an aer­i­al, you can still access five inter­net-based BBC chan­nels: BBC Three (301), BBC Scot­land (302), BBC ALBA (303), BBC NEWS (501) and BBC Par­lia­ment (502). More chan­nels may fol­low in the future.

How do I remove the duplic­ates? #

Option 1: Hide or delete duplicates

  1. Go to Home → Set­tings → Chan­nels → Edit Channels
  2. Choose to hide or delete the duplic­ate channels

Option 2: Turn off Freeview Play Chan­nel Management

This will restore the tra­di­tion­al Freeview chan­nel num­bers, with SD chan­nels start­ing at 1 and HD chan­nels at 101. It will also remove the five inter­net chan­nels. How­ever, since these chan­nels are already avail­able via your aer­i­al, this shouldn’t be an issue for most users

To dis­able Chan­nel Management:

  1. Go to Home → Set­tings → Chan­nels → Freeview Play Chan­nel Management
  2. Press OK to per­form a full retune.

Import­ant: Retun­ing will reset favour­ites, hid­den chan­nels, sched­uled record­ings, remind­ers, and region­al set­tings. You can also choose to restore any deleted channels.

We know see­ing BBC chan­nels twice might be con­fus­ing, and we’d likely dis­able this fea­ture by default if Freeview Play Chan­nel Man­age­ment wasn’t required!