A year after the announcement of the Freebox Ultra, Free subscribers are wondering what the ISP has in store for the year 2025. According to Tino-X83, well known to the Free community for its advance information, Xavier Niel's firm is working on a new Freebox Player. The new box would be called “Freebox Super Player” and would accompany the current Freebox Ultra.
Freebox Super Player for “super” performance?
It would integrate a 5-core ARMv8 chip clocked at 2.02 GHz, as well as 4 GB of RAM. This 5-core configuration is probably, but it is surprising to say the least. Most ARMv8 SoCs adopt a big.LITTLE architecture with a variable number of cores and this is often even. However, the choice of Free is entirely possible and would also offer a higher level of power than what the operator currently offers. The whole thing would run under Google's Android 14 operating system rather than using an in-house solution. A choice which is obviously not trivial and would allow the TV player to access a large catalog of applications.
Last year, Xavier Niel announced exclusively to Univers Freebox that a new player was on the way for the Freebox Ultra. The founder spoke of the difficulties of innovating on the TV box, but affirmed that his teams are working “on specifics or things that you might like”.
Now that Free has unveiled its Freebox Pro and the Freebox Ultra occupies the high-end segment, the ISP has every interest in offering a “player” on its server. Remember that the Freebox Ultra subscription (49.99 euros for 1 year, then 59.99 euros/month) includes a complete TV offer with more than 280 channels included. We find in particular the channels TV by Canal, Canal+ La Chaîne en livre and Universal+, but also Netflix (Standard with advertising), Prime Video and Disney+ (Standard with advertising).
-Currently, it is the Free 4K TV Player launched in 2020 with the Freebox Pop which accompanies the Freebox v9. It also works under Android, like the Free 4K Player from 2015, while the Devialet player ran with the Freebox Player OS.
When will the Freebox Super Player be released?
Officially, Free has not broached the subject of a new box to accompany its Freebox Ultra. The Freebox Super Player is expected to arrive sometime in 2025. As indicated by the specialist site Univers Freebox, it could “not to be solely dedicated to Freebox Ultra subscribers” and other boxes could benefit from it.
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