BT and EE Seeking UK Broadband Pay TV Deal with Apple

Newspaper reports have claimed that ISP BT are in early discussions with Apple over what could represent a significant shift in their Pay TV strategy within the United Kingdom, which might result in their EE mobile brand bundling Apple’s set-top-boxes with their home broadband and phone packages.

Sources are alleged to have informed the Telegraph (paywall) that if all goes to plan then EE’s broadband customers could expect to receive a pre-loaded IPTV (video streaming) box from Apple, which would include various apps, as well as support for BT Sport and TV channels from other broadcasters.

The arrangement is described as being similar in nature to the one that telecoms operator Salt has with Apple in Switzerland, where the 32GB Apple TV 4K box is re-packaged as Salt.tv. The box is then shipped with access to 300 live TV channels, Dolby Atmos sound and cloud based PVR (video recording) features (see details).

Mind you Salt offers that alongside a 10Gbps symmetric FTTP broadband service at €49.95 and we’re a long way from seeing anything affordable like that from Openreach’s network in the UK, although rivals like Hyperoptic and Gigaclear could do it if they saw a demand for more than 1Gbps. But of course you don’t need all that speed for 4K TV channel streaming (a single 4K stream tends to use c.15-30Mbps variable).

The possible deal seems to mirror the kind of partnership that Sky (Sky Broadband) has already established with Roku, which resulted in their low cost NOW TV (NOW Broadband) brand. This distributes the Roku set-top-boxes with various apps, Video-on-Demand (VoD) content and live access to Sky’s premium TV channels. Indeed competing or even beating this may be part of BT’s goal, particularly in light of the recent Comcast news.

At this point some might ask: “Why would they do this on EE but not BT’s own Pay TV platform?” Part of the reason might be because BT’s own Pay TV solution is currently based around the YouView model of set-top-boxes (for now..), while EE’s TV service has a different pre-BT merger history and lately hasn’t been given much attention. EE thus makes a good platform to test this out.

We also note that existing EE customers can already add Apple’s 4K TV box plan from just £15 a month for 11 months, with £14 upfront (or £179 as a one-off payment). So there’s already an established relationship, even if the content side still needs some work in order to meet the aforementioned Pay TV service proposal.

At present the two sides are described as being in early discussions, so we might not learn of the outcome until next year.