Why is Freely, an innocuous UK-based streaming service backed by a bluster of local broadcasters, making waves on the international scene? Even before this week’s watershed deal to port the Freely app on Amazon Fire TV smart TVs, the fledgling streaming platform—operated by Everyone TV and launched in April 2024—has been gaining global notoriety. The deal with Amazon is particularly disruptive for the fragmented smart TV OS space – spelling bad news for entrants like TiVo OS looking to make a mark in Europe. Freely’s hype is partly because other streaming resistances inked between local broadcasters, with the mission to immortalize free-to-view broadcast content in the OTT era, have failed cataclysmically. It is also because broadcast puppeteers see Freely as…