Sony announced at CES that almost all of its 2015 TV range would run Android TV. Today the company is announcing that all of those TVs will also be able to offer YouView's services, including its distinctive user interface design, and the much-praised seven-day EPG with catch-up services built in.
The service will bring all four of the major catch-up services along with it, with iPlayer, ITV Player, Demand Five and 4oD represented.
Anyone who has used YouView will know that you can search for shows, or use the EPG to scroll back through the last seven days of content, easily the best part of YouView's offering.
We asked Sony how the service works, if the YouView interface is run as an Android app, or if there's something else going on, and it wasn't able to give us much more information. It did say that it has worked closely with YouView engineers to produce a great user experience.
Even so, there is the possibility that adding YouView will make the TVs a bit too complicated. These are, after all, Android TV products. Sony told us that users would be able to choose which user interface to use for the EPG when they set their TV up initially.
But YouView offers many of the same features as Android TV, like Netflix and catch-up TV apps like Demand 5 and BBC iPlayer. For non-technical users, this might present a source of some confusion, as may having to "start" the YouView app, which is different to how every other YouView box works.
A total of 20 TVs
The 4K TVs offering the service are the X94C, X93C, X90C, X85C and X83C. If you're looking to buy a full HD model the W85C, W80C and W75C will offer YouView. It's not clear if other TV manufacturers will follow suit and offer embedded YouView, but Sony told us it will certainly be the first.
The YouView service will be added at some point in the summer. TVs sold between now and then will be updated to add the facility shortly after.
