No, Pepper. It's not about smart TVs. That's why I made a point of saying I was accessing iPlayer via Freeview. You don't need a smart TV to watch iPlayer. It could be a couple of things. You may need to retune Freeview or, if your set is old, it could be that the manufacturer is no longer providing updates to the Freeview software. Until fairly recently, I had an old Sony set which, when I bought it was state of the art and one of the first Freeeview ready sets. Twenty years on, I could only tune to a fraction of the Freeview stations available because Sony had stopped writing the software updates to support older sets. I couldn't even get iPlayer, for example.
I don't understand what you mean when you say it cost you when they got rid of analogue services. Those channels are now digital (DTV) but still come via a TV aerial or a freesat receiver. Do you mean you had to buy a receiver?