This app was the only thing that made Live TV worthwhile on Sony. Guide surfing and scheduling recordings was fast and you could easily surf and switch channels from within the guide. On the Austrian Sony web page (and I assume others too) they are still advertising the app for some discontinued products. They removed the ads for the most recent products.
I can't read all this praise for the new XE models in the press anymore. It just does not reflect the bad shape those TVs are in. Reviewers only care about image quality. 95% of the people can't even discern most differences if not watched side by side. They want to watch TV and stuff to be stable which is just not the case. Nobody writes how Sony takes key features away, or how they take over one year to release Marshmallow and still [profanity removed by moderator] it up big time.
Gracenote isn't cheap. I know that much. On most other devices, people have to pay a monthly/yearly fee for the service. But you just can't advertise this feature and then take it away. How about the app just pulling the EPG (DVB-EIT) data from the TV? I know that won't help in case of Freesat, but...
So now that Sony TVs do not have any dependency to the SideView app anymore concerning Live TV, how about moving to Google's Live Channels which really evolved in the last 2 years? I could also imagine Google doing a mobile companion app for it. Just dreaming... I know that Sony still has to get channel management right, but it would still be a lot less code to maintain.
