BT TV Adds Amazon Prime Video to its UK Broadband IPTV Platform

Broadband ISP BT has announced that they’ve become the first major UK pay TV provider to offer access via their YouView (IPTV) powered set-top-box to Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service, which will show up as an app to customers of the service. But those with their Youview+ Ultra HD (4K) boxes have to wait.

The new Amazon service is already being rolled out “gradually” to “all” BT TV customers from this week, although owners of their Youview+ Ultra HD boxes will have to wait and bit longer and should get it “later in the summer.” In addition, customers with an older YouView+ BT TV box “won’t have access” to the app and should contact the provider in order to enquire about an upgrade (so not quite “all“).

Tony Singh, BT’s Consumer Content Director, said:

“We’re delighted to be the first UK pay-TV service to offer Amazon Prime Video content to our customers. BT TV gives our customers the flexibility they want to watch all their favourite shows – and of course all the sport – in one place and on one bill.

Our ambition is to offer an unrivalled choice of TV content for our customers by partnering with the very best providers, with Prime Video joining a brilliant line-up including BT Sport, Netflix, NOW TV, BBC iPlayer.”

Naturally BT TV users will need to be subscribed to the Amazon Prime service in order to access it, which currently costs £79.00 a year or £7.99 a month (this also gives you access to music streaming and cheaper / faster deliveries on parcels etc.). We note that Amazon recently won the rights to show 20 Premier League matches a season for 3 years from 2019, which complements the BT Sport offering (here).

Both Netflix and NOW TV are also either already part of BT’s offering or due to join them in 2019, which makes their TV platform an increasingly strong aggregator of content. On the other hand it’s easy enough to get all of this on third-party set-top-boxes (e.g. Roku) and recently BT TV has been bleeding customers (here).