This thread has turned rather vitriolic against Sony and in some ways it's fair, in some ways it's not.
If it were easy to fix making iPlayer 4k HDR work, Sony/BBC would have done it. It's clearly a technically complex problem caused by the interaction of specific hardware in these specific models, against the way that the BBC has chosen to implement the 4k HDR stream. It's no different to any other Android systems in this sense; when I bought my new Huawei P20 Lite phone, for instance, the Eurosport Player App failed to work because of some weird, unfortunate combination of hardware, software and App. They did sort it after some weeks but it was evidently easy to fix when they knew the problem; the iPlayer problem evidently is not easy.
An Android TV is basically a phone without the phone bit, and with a monster panel. Therefore it suffers all the same problems as Android phones do, in particular compatibility with enormous variations in hardware and software. Things change, such as iPlayer; the original iPlayer HLG demo worked fine, for instance, but upping it to 4k and changing some encoding systems broke it for a small combination of software and hardware (unfortunately, our combination!) which is frustrating. However, the BBC and Sony have to concentrate on covering the largest number of people possible in the remaining time, and that means that relatively low-volume combinations (such as us) are lower down the pecking order than sorting out combinations that sell in greater quantities. This is no different to everywhere else in the Android-based industry.
All this "I remember when Sony was great and customer-focused" nonsense is tedious. Rose-tinted spectacles remember when TVs were just TVs and all they had to support was an aerial and maybe SCART, which was of course easier. Even then, some combinations of RGB sources, widescreen switching and so on didn't work, but it never got fixed, you just had to lump it. At least now they do work on fixes where they can.
Similarly "I'm never buying a Sony again" is also rather petulant. If you look on the BBC iPlayer 4k HDR list, there are enormous numbers of Panasonic models that also aren't supported, and they don't even run Android.
The grass is always greener when things don't work; I changed from Panasonic to Sony to get better motion processing, which it has, but meanwhile lost the ability to do 60fps from YouTube and have to suffer a slow Android interface. I bet if you dig deeply, you'll find just as many problems with various specific models from all the manufacturers.
It's also unfair to shoot the messenger and have a go at the customer support reps. They can only go on the information they're given by their techies and software development teams. Asking them again and again is a bit like asking who'll win the World Cup repeatedly; you'll get an answer when it's sorted and until then, it's somewhere in the system being diagnosed.
If you want to go off and strop and never buy a Sony again, then that's your prerogative and feel free to do so. However the bottom line is that no TV is perfect, every system has incompatibilities and nothing works 100% now or will do so in the future. I'm sure the Roku kit is good (though I've had all sorts of problems with the Roku-based NowTV boxes over the years) so if you absolutely must have 4k instead of HD for some football, go for it.
Meanwhile we will just have to wait until we get a definitive answer from Sony and the BBC - which I rather suspect won't be for some time after the World Cup which is no doubt causing masses of overtime at the BBC to support. Remember the BBC isn't contracted to do this, it's a dry run before rolling out proper 4k HDR in future and it just happens that they're doing their beta testing in public instead of behind closed doors. While this is great for the public to see what things are going on, the flip side is that those who can't have it (yet) always feel slighted and sometimes lose sight of the fact that this is still very much a work in progress.
And I do totally agree that it's frustrating and disappointing. In most ways, I love this TV, it's just hampered by using Android and in this case whatever compatibility problem is preventing the BBC's specific implementation of 4k HDR.
