ISP BT Separates Sport TV Content from Broadband, At Cost

UK ISP BT has announced that they will make their BTSport TV content available via a separate flexible monthly pass, which means that customers no longer have to bundle it in with the provider’s own broadband or another service in order to receive it. However such a pass will set you back £25 per month.

Just for a little comparison, if you were to bundle access (it’s an optional add-on) via just the BTSport App with an existing BT broadband package then that would only add £10 per month to your rental, albeit alongside a 24 month contract term. Alternatively if you were to add it to an existing Sky TV service then you’d expect to pay £16 a month on a 24 month term.

BT’s arch rival, Sky, has been doing a similar monthly pass via their NOW TV sibling for a long time, although it’s more expensive at £33.99 per month (or from £18 if you bundle it with an existing Sky TV service) but then you do get a much wider selection of Premier League football matches. Plus there are some other differences in terms of sport type and coverage, but we won’t go into that here.

Pete Oliver, BT Consumer MD of Marketing, said:

“Customers can sign up on a flexible monthly basis for the first time. The monthly pass forms part of BT’s ambition to offer BT Sport customers unrivalled choice and the highest-quality broadcasts on even more devices and platforms.”

BT Sport was originally seen as a key feature for helping to drive take-up and reduce churn on their fixed broadband and other services (in the early days it existed as a free add-on). But by separating Sport from those services the provider may risk reducing the appeal of their primary products, although the operator hopes that the big discounts it gives BT Sport on bundles should balance against that.

Apparently customers can still expect to receive key features, such as 4K and HDR content, with the new monthly pass (dependent upon the support of whatever hardware or software you’re using to view it).