BT TV Customers Informed of EE TV Rebranding Plan for December
Residential customers of UK broadband ISP BT, specifically those who take their Pay TV service, are this week starting to be informed about the previously announced plan to re-brand their service to EE TV. The notice reveals that this change will officially take place from 6th December 2023.
The plan for BT’s big branding switch was revealed last month (here) and forms part of their ongoing efforts to turn EE into the group’s “flagship brand for our consumer customers” (i.e. converged broadband ISP and mobile plans etc.).
“The switch over will happen automatically, so customers don’t need to do anything – all that changes will be a new look to their service – the actual service itself, any recordings, and the price they pay remains unimpacted. Moving forward customers will be able to enjoy all the great content they know and love today, as well as have the opportunity to access new services in the future,” said a BT spokesperson to ISPreview today.
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In terms of the “new” EE TV products (initially it’s still using BT TV’s existing kit), these are said to reflect a “comprehensive range of flexible content and set-top-box options“. For example, the EE TV Box Pro device with multi-room is due to launch in the “coming months“ and the EE TV app is to launch on Apple TV 4K with a bespoke TV guide, offering a live TV experience as well as an EE branded remote.
In addition, the Apple TV app will also become available on EE’s set-top boxes. EE plans to release more details about their “new” TV products, launch timings, pricing, and availability for new customers in the coming months.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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i wonder if the discovert+ app will appear on the t4000 boxes at the same time ..probily not
Why do you need the discovery app on there… should be on the package your paying for on youview .. mine is
I’ve just taken up an offer to get TNT sport with the BT TV Box Pro. Here’s the bizarre thing – BT wanted £6 a month extra for HD/UHD which I declined BUT at the same time they sign you up with the Discovery+ app which I installed on my Samsung TV and you get HD/UHD through the app anyway. So pay them an extra £6 a month to get HD/UHD on their box or get it free via the app. Tough choice.
I’ve noticed the public Wifi on my Smart Hub 2 has already been rebranded as EE.
Tyler says:
November 8, 2023 at 11:53 am
Why do you need the discovery app on there… should be on the package your paying for on youview .. mine is
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i have a bttv t4000 box and it DOES NOT have the discovery+ app on it , i can access the app on my phone and then cast it to my chromecast dongle , i assume you have a pro box which does have the app
Does this mean you can cancel your BT contract as that is who I signed up to?
Probably not.
I tried to order the new 1.6gbps EE service but BT wouldnt let me do it as my TV is still in contract with BT(have BT900). I have to wait until EE Tv is launched before i can move over.
BT and EE are both trading names of British Telecommunications PLC, who your contract is with.
125us
EE dont have a TV service out yet or a TV box. Its probably easier for them to just make customers wait until EE Tv officially launches, which is basically what i was told. That way they wont have to support BT boxes using an EE router of service. I know its weird but thats what they are saying. My contract is with BT at the minute.
Big mistake, HUGE.
Why? According to BT, EE is more known by younger people, if that is true I don’t know, but that is what they say and is why they are changing everything to EE.
It could be because there are more people not liking BT and they think the change of name will help.
At the end of the day it will be the same thing just with a different name, nothing else will change, still the same awful customer service and the same inflated prices.
@Ad47uk.
EE or “Everything Everywhere” is a dreadful brand name IMO, pure boardroom guff, it certainly doesn’t offer what it says on the tin. At least GPO and later BT were meaningful relevant brandings.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the decision isn’t reversed at a later date.
100% agree with this. EE always felt like a holding brand, devised to reflect that neither France or Deutsche had supremacy in the joint venture and neither had any intention of staying long term. IMHO, as soon as BT bought it, they should have applied their much more established and recognisable name to it immediately.
This whole “New EE” marketing campaign is just bunkum, apparently you can do gaming or work on *their* fibre broadband. Wow, what an innovation! Hilarious that they are supposedly phasing out BT, yet keep mentioning how it is “powered by BT.”
I also associate EE with a certain tendency to fleece its customers. Remember when you were on Orange or T-Mobile, and wanted 4g. Sorry, you’ll have to agree a new (much more expensive) contract! Oh, 5g comes along, what’s that sir you want 5g? new (much more expensive) contract required. What’s that, do you want Max speeds or normal? LOL. Fleece fleece fleece.
My family are on BT mobile, got 5g upgrade for free, and still have free roaming, and I have a “converged” bill for broadband mobile and TV with one direct debit. Can’t wait for them to tell me I have to move the mobiles to EE (onto a separate bill and direct debit, LOL). Oh, with a massive price increase to boot no doubt. Interestingly I have been booted out of family plans on Orange, then EE, so BT if/when it happens will make the full set.
I agree with Nick and Gerard, what they said is correct. I also want to add some things: BT is more known than EE not the other way around, BT has been here longer than EE, it has a very long history as the oldest telecommunications company in the world dating back to 1846, whereas EE is relatively new and has been here since 2010 (its pre-merged brands Orange and T-Mobile were founded in the 1990s). BT is an acronym for British Telecom or British Telecommunications, it has meaning. Whereas EE is an acronym for Everything Everywhere, which is terrible and doesn’t mean anything. As far as logo/colour schemes, I prefer BT’s over EE,
When BT acquired EE, I was hoping for EE to vanish and remember seeing an article about “Why BT must kill off the EE brand” back in 2016 (you can find this article by searching if you are interested to read this), and in full agreement with what that article says. The article mentions EE brand value around £4 billion at the time whereas in another article BT’s is way higher. To add to this, it says about EE being a big brand but BT is a behemoth, and “EE has the lowest net promoter score of any of the major mobile network” – I still can’t understand why they have chosen to go ahead with EE, the only thing I can be glad is BT is still there just not on the consumer side, but whoever decided to go with EE didn’t think things through properly!
BT is the largest broadband and landline provider, changing over to EE may be a catastrophic mistake and if it results in subscriber losses/uptake, their fault for choosing that rubbish brand. If they rebranded EE to BT, this would not be a catastrophic mistake given BT’s longer footing in the telecommunications industry, the BT name/brand is printed all around the UK such as telegraph poles, kiosks, towers, the BT Tower in London with BT logo going all the way around, sponsorships of sports teams and former BT Sport increased their already widespread brand presence, therefore nullifying “EE is more known by young people” reason (which I’m not sure where they got that data from, I’m a young person and EE is not known more to me), formerly had their own mobile network called BT Cellnet before it was spun off and sold to Telefónica as O2 in 2006 which includes mobile networks in other countries BT also owned at the time, and as EE mainly provides mobile services when it was acquired, rebranding to BT is easier
Finally, BT is the British equivalent of America’s AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) which also has long history and is one of the oldest telecommunications company in the world. That article says “Back in 2006 AT&T were thought to have paid $4bn for the Cingular brand as part of the $86bn acquisition of BellSouth. Despite this outlay, within a year AT&T had begun phasing out Cingular and migrating customers across to their AT&T Mobile offering” – we can see here AT&T paid a lot to buy BellSouth and the Cingular brand had around the same brand value as EE yet it was phased out in favour of AT&T, why did BT not do the same with EE?
It’s a shame BT have decided to do this with EE which should have been phased out, it is indeed a big mistake! I do wonder if Deutsche Telekom’s 12% stake in BT that came from the acquisition could be one of the reasons why BT was unable to get rid of the EE brand?
I agree with others that the BT brand is much stronger than that of EE – and that BT will ultimately regret rebranding its consumer division.
I suspect the main reason for the rebranding is that the head of the BT consumer division/brands is the ex-CEO of EE.
my mum has a payg ee sim,i gave her my old smart phone so that we could use find friends but were unable to get it to work ,found out the sim does not do data ,she went into ee shop to ask for an upgrade sim and she was told that will be £10 pm extra to use , ITS PAY AS YOU GO but no it does not matter its still £10 . she said forget it and walked out
They had a EE TV box but that stopped in 2021.
The well thought comments and issues raised in the article are well known to all the senior board members of BT yet the rebrand will lose BT customers and impact the reputation of BT.