Freeview is celebrating another big win in its ongoing battle to get its content in front of more viewers after renewing a contract with Vestel, one of Europe’s leading television set manufacturers.
The deal will see the Freeview Play service featured prominently on all Vestel-made TVs for the next five years, Freeview said.
Most readers will be familiar with Freeview Play, which is the U.K.’s fastest growing TV platform and entirely free to use. Freeview, the company behind it, has been striving to promote the platform and has tied up a long list of recent partnerships that have seen it integrated with Amazon’s latest Fire TVs, the new Humax AURA set-top box, and Toshiba’s latest Android TVs, for example.
In addition to Freeview Play’s core applications, which together add up to more than 20,000 hours of on-demand content, the service provides access to more than 85 live TV channels. It claims to have had more than 10 million sales, with total users exceeding 5 million.
Partnering with Vestel is a big deal for Freeview. Vestel is based in Turkey and has a pretty enormous manufacturing operation going on, making TVs for more than 20 brands including the likes of Hitachi, Toshiba and JVC.
Vestel’s deputy general manager of marketing and product management Barış Altınkaya said the renewed partnership was great news for his company as having Freeview Play on board adds greater value to the Smart TVs it produces.
The deal will see Vestel provide an introduction video to Freeview Play with each TV set it builds. Meanwhile, its packaging will also display the Freeview Play offering and its core applications, which include the BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub, All 4, My5 and STV Player, Freeview said.
“As we have seen over the past year, whether it is the latest news or box set, ensuring that we can alll easily access public service broadcasting is so important to our society,” Freeview Play’s director of business development and strategy Simon Hunt said in a statement. “Freeview Play delivers this to millions of viewers and we are delighted to be partnering with Vestel to enhance the viewing experience in new and exciting ways.”
