Our Year in Review: 24/25
Written by Riccardo Balestiero, CEO of YouView
As we close out fiscal year 24/25, I’d like to thank all YouView staff and our partners for a brilliant season of product delivery delighting both customers and end users. Our biggest accomplishment across the year has been the launch of Freely, Everyone TV’s solution for the IP era to safeguard the future of Free TV in the UK, but we have also impressively improved our product for both EE and Talk Talk with a raft of UI innovation.
Here are the key FY 24/25 highlights:
- We worked in close partnership with Everyone TV on the launch of Freely early in the year and successfully extended its presence across nine Smart TV Consumer brands, three operating systems and multiple hardware partners. Freely’s smart TV brand partners now represent 50% of the Smart TV market. We also added 6 brilliant new content partners to the platform; a mere appetiser of what is yet to come as we support Everyone TV’s vision of landing its new paradigm for free, British, high-quality TV across all connected devices in the UK;
- And while increased end user viewing and our B2B customer satisfaction are our ultimate prizes, we are proud that Freely picked up a raft of awards among which Best HbbTV Content Discovery Service, Best HbbTV Newcomer of the Year and Best HbbTV Innovation;
- On EE TV we completed our content app line-up with the additions of YouTube, Discovery+ and Paramount+;
- On TalkTalk TV we upgraded our service to Android 12 and enhanced Google Assistant voice control capabilities;
- Our User Interface has been a key focus this year, as aggregated content discovery across providers is a growing end-user requirement. As a result we introduced a raft of new features, uplifting the look and feel of our UI, improving accessibility and introducing new exciting content discovery rails;
- We keep progressing in our strategy of diversification of revenue streams and are proud to have extended our Dynamic Advertising Insertion service to IP channels. We believe this business stream has promising growth potential and we are working closely with our PSB partners to provide effective solutions to address their efficient scaling challenges;
- We now pride ourselves for serving over 3m end users in the UK across different TV services and we continue to innovate our multi-tenanted back-end platform, the heart of our super-aggregation capability;
- Financially we have made our cost base more efficient and reduced our deficit and we are proud of having accelerated our plans to halve our scope 1 and 2 CO2e emissions by 2030 as we keep supporting our people and the planet through the commitments we have made as a B-Corp accredited company.
Looking ahead, we aim to drive further scale to our platform, through both Freely and ISP service growth to continue delighting our end-users to unlock the potential of Artificial Intelligence and to further diversify our revenue streams. I personally cannot wait: welcome Fiscal Year 2025/26!