Does anyone use the UK catch-up services on their ATV boxes?
None are optimised for ATV and so a mouse is needed but I've been please try surprised how well they seem to work now compared to previously.
Such a shame My5 won't do HD - but then I don't think they do on any platform.
iPlayer and the ITV app work very well on the Shield. But, it'd be nice to have some of the other UK apps. Been rolling around the idea of getting a Fire TV just for the different apps that are not available on the Shield.
In general I agree the UK channels need tobpull there fi gers out ans cone onboard AndroidTV. Though to say "none are optimised" isn't strickly true as depends on what box you use , Iplayer and ITVplayer are on the shield and Sony TV's and i installed ITVplayer on my mibox last night
PuppetMaster.TV's REKODI repo has iPlayer, ITV and a bunch of others.
There is a 3rd party app called TVPlayer, which is an Android TV app. 3.x versions can be used outside of the UK if you're using a DNS Proxy or VPN, but it does nag you to update. 4.x versions requires enabling location access.
It does request that you register to access all FTA channels, and there is a subscription option to get some Pay TV channels. To subscribe, you need a UK credit card.
Apparently KCOM in the UK will be launching Pay TV services using an Android TV based box sometime this year, using a Technicolor box, which may have Android TV versions of UK apps - https://sites.google.com/view/droid-tv/pay-tv-provider/kcom
Meanwhile all the UK channels have their apps running on Fire TV natively. At this point, it's pretty obvious that Google has no interest whatsoever in making the effort to encourage these services to view Android TV as a viable platform for development (or just pay them to do it). Nor do they even have a Google-made device to develop such apps on anymore. If catch-up is a priority for you, there are better choices.