EE Extends Sky Partnership and Brings Sky Stream to UK Customers
Mobile operator and broadband ISP EE (BT) has today announced that they’ve extended and expanded their strategic partnership Sky UK, which among other things means that Sky Stream will launch in EE retail stores, via the their website, and telesales from 15th October 2024; it can also now be taken alongside EE’s home broadband and mobile services.
The move is interesting because Sky’s internet-based TV and streaming service, Sky Stream, is technically a competitor for EE’s own TV product. But now, for the first time, EE’s customers will be able to order Sky Stream alongside EE home broadband, “enhancing EE’s TV portfolio by offering customers a wider choice of viewing options and bringing the benefits of Sky into the homes of millions more“.
Clearly, EE sees the move as “giving customers a choice of viewing platform“, which they say will build on their longstanding relationship since 2017 – supporting their strategy to partner with leading consumer electronics and entertainment providers to offer customers a wide range of options.
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Marc Allera, CEO at EE, said:
“As part of our strategy for new EE, we’re continually looking to partner with some of the world’s leading brands to provide our customers with the very best in entertainment. Extending our partnership with Sky allows us to give customers even greater choice, so they can take a TV service that best suits their lifestyle, matched with EE’s great new home broadband offering.”
Sophia Ahmad, Chief Consumer Officer at Sky, said:
“Sky Stream offers a transformative viewing experience, making it even easier for customers to access Sky’s market-leading entertainment offer, with no dish required. We’re excited to be partnering with EE to take the benefits of Sky Stream into the front rooms of even more customers, bringing them one of the highest standards in viewing experience combined with great live sport and award-winning Sky Originals all in one place.”
It’s easy to forget that, not so very long ago, BT was still spending big in order to try and build up its presence in the Pay TV market and weaken the hold on premium content and services that Sky was perceived as having. But BT has long since retreated from that effort and today’s market is a lot more complex, with a plethora of streaming platforms and wide scale content fragmentation.
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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This is bad, Sky is already a Monopoly
it’s worse than that – sky stream is terrible. Sky should just bite the bullet, merge sky go and now tv and release an app that sits on any device selling their service.
So a monopoly company using a monopoly company, sounds about right. I tend to avoid EE/BT, Vodafone and any other providers that try to shove everything in one basket.
That is where Plusnet was pretty good, they phoned me once about their Tv service, I told them no, thanks and never heard from them again. I did take out their sim only contract for a few months, but not because they bugged me into doing it, that is something they did not do, but because I thought I would give it a go.
I have seen how BT/EE, Vodafone and sky bugs people who just have their broadband, certainly sky with emails almost every couple of weeks. Please have our TV service.
God help people with EE, now.
This surely can only be be seen as precursor to BT/EE withdrawing from their own TV platform? It just doesn’t make sense for them to cannibalise sales of their own platform.
Does this mean they’re abandoning EETV? I had it about a decade ago and it was terribly underwhelming (basically just a Freeview DVR) it may be better now, I saw they were still promoting it on a billboard recently.
It was revamped and is now a rebranded BT TV. Back with BT you could get some quite good deals for Now TV + Netflix, and EE let you use an Apple TV rather than their set top box.
Wouldn’t be surprised to see BT sell off its remaining interest in TNT sport to Warner Brothers Discovery as well. Clearly Alison Kirkby has decided pouring money down a black hole isn’t such a good idea.
I honestly don’t think EE/BT have any idea what their strategy is. They’ve been a mess for years.
You still can’t even order EE TV as an existing customer without calling them.
BT thought they could take on Sky, and it failed, shame really as sky needed to be taken on. The problem is, and still is with the streaming services, is that people are the ones that have to pay out for different services as they show different things.
I hate football, so I would not pay a penny for it, but there are people who pay a load to watch some men running around a field, then they have to pay a load again to watch different men run around a field on a different service.
@Ad47uk
Trouble was when the CMA decided that Sky had a monopoly over Premier League football rather than make them sell the complete package to 2 (or more) competing broadcasters they allowed the league to divide up the games and sell different games to different broadcasters, so instead of one monopoly they have essentially created multiple monopolies and the viewer is worse off than they were before.
End of EE TV looming then (starting with new customers first).
Probably because Sky signed with Cityfibre, an independent fibre to the home infrastructure provider.
EETV has less channels to offer than Sky Stream, and costs EE/BT money to administer and support.
Added to the fact Openreach run current legacy GPON asymmetric network offerings vs majority XGS-PON symmetric superior end customer network of Cityfibre.
I guess that EE didn’t want their TV offering to be inferior as well….
City Fibre is not “majority on XGS-PON”. That will take a long time to correct with existing areas like Milton Keynes. Thankfully, NexFibre has leapfrogged them already technology wise. (Including in Milton Keynes).
Thanks for explaining what Cityfibre is – I’m sure no one who posts on this website had previously heard of them. I’m also not sure what symmetric broadband has to do with TV but whatever.
Sky Stream will run perfectly well over the UK’s largest and most profitable FTTP network, that provides perfectly reliable service to many more people than Cityfibre ever will.
Cityfibre? Oh isn’t that the company whose own directors admit “a material uncertainty exists which may cast significant doubt on the ability of the Group and Company to continue as a going concern”. Yep I’ve heard of them.
City Fibre doesn’t have the scale to be a huge threat yet. They’ll take years to grow to the same level as Virgin Media and OR.
Sky being available via CF to 20% of people isn’t an issue to OR. TV is downstream so XGS is irrelevant.
Ngo2 – yes it is. Cityfibre already converted some legacy GPON and majority of their network is now XGS-PON, and will complete a damn sight quicker than BT will.
Ivor, if BT hadn’t inherited migrations from previous customers to FTTP, then they wouldn’t be. If they had the same start as the ALTNETS, they’d be pale in comparison. Historic customers and awareness of what BT brand is has given them hose figures NOT the technology they deploy as it is inferior to other non-legacy products.
Openreach can’t force a migration from FTTC to their own FTTP. That’s down to the ISPs, and as you have been cheerleading, they don’t have to use Openreach in areas where other options exist. Sky could move people from OR FTTC to CF FTTP if they want (though probably with backlash).
You could also make the case that the altnets have had their way too, with PIA giving them a cheaper/quicker way to build. Not sure how you “compete” when you use the ducts and poles of your competitor but whatever.
“the historic BT brand” has nothing to do with Openreach’s success. That will be more down to the realities of having the biggest network with fewer integration hassles. Anyway, you keep saying Openreach are a dinosaur with outdated products and a particular obsession with their asymmetry, so why aren’t people flocking to altnets?
@BT Ivor, I expect sky stream will work fine over a decent FTTC connection, if it don;t then a lot of people are going to be stuffed, since there are still thousands of people on FTTC.
@anonymous be mindful speaking about BT on here, BT Ivor and Small Mike still need to cash their shares in!!!
Alternatively – opens up a different strategy where the BT CDN for TV is used by another provider.
Most of the premium channels are already broadcast UK wide over so there could potentially be a Stream service provisioned where the device authenticates using the same interface as EE TV does to show that content.
Else the BT MAUD network is about to get its biggest customer.
Is this likely to use multicast or unicast for live channels? multicast benefits from much lower latency
EE have recently been testing through a multicast channel called ‘FishTank TV’ – previously used for tests in 2020.
They’ve also started carrying duplicates of a few channels. There doesn’t appear to be any difference in bitrates or codecs – although some of the ‘BT’ tags that are present on most channels, aren’t on the dupes.
That being said, I doubt EE are about to start carrying all Sky Stream’s linear services through their multicast network within the next few weeks. Aside from the technical complexities and hardware/software changes, Sky wouldn’t have direct control over delivery.
@EETV User – “Aside from the technical complexities and hardware/software changes, Sky wouldn’t have direct control over delivery.”
Sky has no direct control over the end delivery if a Sky Stream user is on EE BB/BT BB/Vodafone BB as it stands. Delivery over a BT CDN of some form would arguably mean reliable delivery of content (In particular Sports channels with low latency to avoid finding out about goals on a phone 30secs before it’s shown on screen).
After reflection from my earlier comment – I do think MAUD will be the solution.
Given that BT/EE TV was a roundabout way to get NOW TV plus Freeview, I wonder if this has been triggered by the expiry of the old contract and BT/Sky think it now makes more sense to cut out the middleman here.
As others have said, it will certainly be interesting to see if Sky take advantage of BT’s multicast network, either directly or via MAUD.
Could Sky Mobile move from O2 to EE eventually?
They could do with it. I left SKY mobile after several years of dire over saturated network issues
I thought this too – would be quite a high profile MVNO with EE access.