iPlayer Woes

At the weekend we made the unfortunate discovery that iPlayer support for the PS3 is to end early next month. My plan had been to wait another five years or so before investing in a significant upgrade to our entertainment system - probably a new TV, whatever Playstation is then current, a full-blown surround sound system (potentially professionally installed), as well as integrating our media server if we ever get one, and potentially retiring the Freesat box in favour of a better solution.

But that had rather assumed that things would continue to work as they were. Now that that's not the case...

I have researched our options, and they broadly fall into four categories:

• We could just live with it. iPlayer would still be available by PC if there was anything we really felt the need to watch, but would be a hassle.
• We could invest in a Firestick (which would also give us Disney+), and also an HDMI switch so that we can connect it to our soundbar. That's a bad solution, from a technology point of view, but would solve the problem without too much expense.
• We could replace the TV with a smart model. That's a much better solution, albeit a more expensive one than we'd wanted at this time (and also Funsize is a little less tech-proof than perhaps we'd like).
• Or we could bring forward the big expense and just do everything now. I'm not doing that.

(We could also upgrade the PS3 to a PS4, but the timing of that is really poor, given that the PS5 is due to launch very soon. So I don't intent to do that unless we see an absurd deal.)

For the moment, we're going to go for the first option. My suspicion is that that won't stick.

One last thing: I'm starting to think we need to be prepared to abandon Freesat - the range of boxes seems to have dropped significantly, there's no great signs of the range of channels ever increasing, and so my feeling is that it won't be worth investing in a replacement should our existing box stop working. That being the case, I think it's time to look again at why the TV aerial doesn't seem to work... when it really should.