This suggestion - to install an app.- has sort of solved the problem, so thank you. There are a couple of things I don't understand:
1. Why is the error message I was getting so misleading? There is no way from its wording that I could have understood that is was requiring me to install additional software.
2 Why is there a need to install additional software anyway? I certainly don't need to do so on a desktop computer - there, the usual browser suspects allow me to watch UKTV without any additional code. And those browsers are logically identical whether running under Windows, MAC, Linux or Android. This is especially true for Linux and Android, which have a common ancestor. So I think it's a scam.
Worse, is the realisation that the performance and reliability when running on the app on my Minix U9-H is, in reality, unusable, especially when compared to watching the same thing on my 12 year old home-made desktop or my 13 year old laptop. Both are significantly faster than the app running on the Minix. And the Minix device is itself more than adequate when running apps other than UKTV Play. I am also ignoring the fact that the watching experience is made terminally irritating by a thorough contamination by advertising. There are frequent breaks where I am asked to listen to 2 minutes of corporate lies, aimed at the intelligence of an amoeba, in the middle of a documentary. It's a farce. That's one app that is going to motivate me to quickly understand how to delete apps. My desktop screen might be small, but at least it's 1080p, with smooth motion