Manhattan T1 Freeview HD Box, Black

Product Information

All TVs manufactured and sold in the UK since 2010 should already have Freeview built-in. That means that if you bought a telly in the past few years, it should already be capable of showing Freeview channels without a separate box (you would still need an aerial, though). The two things keeping the Aura from our top spot? The high price and a few missing apps – the absence of a Netflix app, in particular, is a big let-down. Next up after looking at the category and the average prices, we thought it would be good to take a look at the brand, Manhattan.

Press the GUIDE button on your T1 remote control. This displays the TV Guide, making it easy to tell when you find the right input. Excellent value for money. Really easy to set up. Hundreds of channels to choose from. Would recommend this item.”

Ensure your aerial is connected to your T1 and an HDMI or AV cable is connected from your T1 to your TV. Billed as a little box with a mighty punch, the Manhattan T1 is an extremely compact if basic Freeview HD receiver with all you need to watch HD and SD channels. It has an aerial input and loop output, an HDMI output and a single analogue AV output, which you can use with Manhattan’s adapter kit if you need to connect the T1 to an old SD TV.

It is likely that the signal from your TV aerial is weak. Indoor aerials are particularly poor and extremely sensitive to direction, meaning they will often tune some channels when placed in one position and a whole different set when placed in another. If you have an outdoor aerial, it may not be aligned correctly to receive signals from your local transmitter.Channel 4-HD is transmitted on every terrestrial transmitter in the UK. So anyone with Freeview-HD kit and an aerial can view it and also record it provided the kit has recording capability. If you have your heart set on a particular brand or even a selection of brands then we’d suggest you spend a bit of time writing up a list of the brands that you would happily buy. This can really help you in narrowing down the selection when it comes to choosing a product. For example, over at Currys PC World you can filter products by brand, so you could filter just to show the brands on your list. This is especially useful knowing that there are 26 Set top boxes to choose from at Currys PC World.

Picture quality support is currently the best out there with 4K, however, it only works with YouTube and some limited BBC iPlayer content – for now. I have a coax cable running from the satellite dish which is live and works as when plug it directly into my LG OLED tv the free view channels work after scanning (no channel 4 HD on freeview) The service provides access to free-to-air TV channels and radio stations, including more than 80 standard channels and 15 HD channels – and that number keeps growing every year. The range goes from all the BBC channels (including HD), ITVX, Channel 4, Channel 5, The Food Network, QVC and many others.Most Freeview boxes these days connect to your TV via an HDMI port. If you don’t have enough free HDMI ports, you can use a good HDMI switcher. If the price appears to be significantly lower than you’d expect for the sort of product you’re buying, then you’d be wise to start looking in a bit more detail at other indicators of the quality. The cheap price comes with a cost, of course – the interface (switching channels, moving around the EPG) is rather slow and some have had issues with the EPG occasionally showing garbled text, picture quality degrades fast with bad reception, the remote is small with too many tightly-spaced buttons, and there’s no internet connection or apps – so no catch-up TV.