Statement: Final report to the Secretary of State on the designation of television selection services

Statement published 16 December 2025

Under the new online availability and prominence regime introduced by the Media Act, connected TV platforms (referred to as ‘television selection services’) designated by the Secretary of State will be required to ensure that BBC iPlayer and other public service broadcaster TV players designated by Ofcom, as well as their public service content, are available, prominent, and easily accessible.

As part of Ofcom’s implementation work, we must provide a report to the Secretary of State setting out our recommendations on the designation of connected TV platforms. Today, following consultation and having applied the principles and methods set out in our April statement, we are publishing that report.

What we are recommending:

Taking account of the points raised by stakeholders in response to our consultation in July, we have assessed the number of users of connected TV platforms on the basis of what we consider to be the best available metric – the number of platforms installed on relevant devices in UK homes that have been actively used in the last year.

Applying this metric, we remain of the view that a platform must have at least 700,000 active users if it is to be considered to have a significant number of users. We consider that setting a threshold at this level will ensure that public service content is widely available.

We recognise that, for some platforms, multiple versions may be in use. In those cases, we recommend that the designations should apply only to versions available on the market in July 2025, when we published our consultation, as well as any subsequent versions.

Finally, we took account of a range of demographic factors, including variations in connected TV platform usage between age groups, income levels, and across the UK’s nations. We have concluded that there are no significant usage differences among these groups that should affect our approach.

Taking the above into account, and using additional information gathered during the consultation period, we have made some amendments to the list of platforms that we proposed to recommend for designation in our consultation. In particular, we have added Freely as, based on our review of more recent data, it now meets the criteria we have set out.

Accordingly, we recommend that the following 15 connected TV platforms (plus any subsequent versions of these platforms) should be designated: Amazon Fire TV OS 6, 7 and 8; Android TV 9, 10, 11, 12 and 14; Apple TV OS 18; Freely; Google TV 10, 11, 12 and 14; LG WebOS 22, 23, 24 and 25; Roku OS 14; Samsung Smart Hub (Tizen) 7, 8 and 9; Sky Entertainment OS; Sky Q; VIDAA OS U6, 7, 8 and 9; Virgin Media Horizon; Virgin Media TiVo on V6 ITE; YouView on EE TV (Sagemcom ITE) and YouView on Sony ITE.