Discovery+ App Access to be Removed from Some Older EE and BT UK TV Boxes
Customers of broadband ISPs EE and BT who also take their Pay TV (IPTV) service, specifically those that continue to use older TV boxes, have been informed that their devices will lose support for the Discovery+ streaming app entirely from 22nd September 2025. This also impacts TNT Sports on-demand content (i.e. catch-up content, extended coverage etc.).
Subscribers to the Pay TV service that have one of the service’s more modern boxes (i.e. TV Box Pro, TV Box Mini, and the custom Apple TV 4K Box) are NOT impacted by this change, but everybody with older kit is. Just to be clear, this doesn’t impact your Discovery+ or TNT Sports subscriptions (access to the linear TV channels is unaffected), only the device support for the Discovery+ app, which also carries TNT Sport’s on-demand content.
According to Cord Busters, customers can resolve this by requesting a “free” box upgrade from EE, although the catch is that you’ll usually then be expected to re-contract to the service for another 24-month term and this will also result in the loss of your existing TV recordings. Alternatively, customers could simply use another device to access the Discovery+ App.
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Further details on the change, which is being led by Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), can be found on this BT help page. The boxes affected are as follows – the BT/EE Humax variant of the:
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- 4K Recordable TV Box
- TV BOX
- Recordable TV Box
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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Probably just easier to buy a firestick if the Discovery+ app isn’t available on your smart TV. I will be dumping my EE TV once my contract is up in November & just going broadband only (probably with Plusnet).
Hi there.
Where are you based. I work for brsk fast full fibre. We do symmetrical speeds on our broadband.
@Aslam Khan – Not within Netomnia-Brsk’s footprint unfortunately.
Channel 4 already dumped support for the original Chromecast (1080HDTV) in their C4 app, so being outside the TV service offers is no guarantee of continuity.
Providers are free to take an unsustainable obsolescence approach since their regulator Offcom doesn’t hold them to account on sustainability.
To be clear, I’m talking about a device that works correctly and on other platforms. No good reason for their decision.
Since bt /ee got together it’s worse now than before there ultimate game is to make us pay for everything pure greed pirates needed like radio caroline all those years ago so we can fcuk em of