It's not Free - and you can't View it, a lot of the time...   

But using the online players is not an adequate alternative - since recording commercial TV progs "off air" means you can skip up to 20 mins of tedious adverts s and credits per hour.

BBC iPlayer is ad-free, but there is no escape from tedious advertising with commercial players - if they work, and many do not due to bugs in the way commercials are delivered and inserted in he program streams. But even when it works as it should, you forced to hand over 25% of your precious leisure time to broadcasters who then sell it to advertisers.

A new approach to TV advertising called InCenTV proposes that you should get a share of the advert revenue for your time to sweeten the bitter pill.

More details of IncenTV will emerge here in due course.
 

It is additionally complicated in 2023 by the fact we are at the 11 year sunspot cycle maximum - which means the solar flux that creates the reflection layers within the ionosphere, is peaking.

Yes, this is nerd stuff, but if you want to understand why your Freeview reception is broken, then there is no simple explanation - which is probably why FreeView itself doesn't want to get embroiled! Useful extra insight by IPK here. And theer is an excellent primer from Wikipedia on Tropospheric Propgation

Interference from the continent seems to have increased in recent years as the digital TV broadcast bands have become more congested on both sides of eh channel - but it's been absolutely diabolical for long periods recently. 

The Freeview broadcast platform is being compromised by foreign interference caused by this effect in many locations, but Freeview, Youview and all their partners are not coming clean and admitting it - because they can do NOTHING to fix it.  It was a problem exacerbated (if not created...) when the government and Ofcom sold off precious broadcast spectrum to mobile companies at the time of the digital broadcast switchover when analogue UHF TV was canned

So now when two signals want to occupy the same frequencies, there is no space and now way to separate them.

Yes, if you have wasted hours chasing around looking for a fix that will never come, you are entitled to be seriously annoyed to learn the truth! You might even be interested to join a legal class action being considered to get compensation for the time and money we have all wasted. (watch here for further info)

Theare are some helpful suggestions at TV answers but they only confirm the intractable nature of the problems of DTT. There are various resources around the web that monitor and report on radio propagation, notably G7IZU's brilliant site covering global propagation with tropo and Sporadic-E charts.

The red lines here indicate the paths that signals are using to reach well beyond the usual 30-40 mile range of  VHF and UHF transmissions.

https://www.tvcomm.co.uk/g7izu/radio-propagation-maps/40-2/

Ofcom is generally useless, and cannot wait to pass the buck. Some people there understands that bad choices by Ofcom have allowed this situation to arise.

We'll be publishing more information in due course - but we cannot defy the laws of physics and fix it. We will be propoed create workarounds and alternatives.

Register your interest in learning more on our twitter timeline @freeviewing

Links to additional resources from the web...
 

Why Does My Freeview Signal Keep Breaking Up And Pixelate?

Freeview interference on some channels but not all

Why Does Digital TV Keep Losing Signal?  January 24, 2021