BT TV customers who want to watch subscription channels in a second room can now take out an Extra Box.
The new multiroom service costs an extra £5/month on top of your current BT TV package and will see you having to pay an extra £99 for a new YouView+ box. Customers with an older BT Vision box as their primary TV box will be able to swap this for a YouView+ box for £35 instead.
This gives you the freedom to access the same catch-up features, record programmes on a second 500GB drive and download to own BT movies in another room – although BT says you won’t be able to get Sky Movies channels on your second box.
Alex Green, Director of TV for BT, said: “We are delighted to be able to offer BT customers the added flexibility of having two YouView+ boxes in their home.
“Over the past year, we have transformed our service by introducing pay TV channels delivered in fantastic HD quality on our market-leading YouView+ box. We believe this offers the best quality TV experience and the most competitive bundle with fibre in the market.”
Extra Box contracts last for a minimum of 12 months and automatically renew. You’ll need to have a BT Infinity 1 and BT Infinity 2 broadband subscription. BT says that only its FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet)-based services have the capacity to deliver live HD channels to multiple rooms.
You’ll also need to be getting speeds of higher than 34Mbps in order for you to take out an Extra Box package.
BT Infinity 1 and 2 promise top speeds of 38Mbps and 76Mbps respectively, but due to the nature of FTTC, you might not be able to get these speeds depending on where you live.
Speeds decrease the further away your home is from a street cabinet, so there’s a chance you might not be able to sign up for Extra Box even if you do have BT Infinity.
BT revealed that the majority of its Infinity customers have sufficient bandwidth to support two YouView boxes at once.
The UK’s largest ISP is also trialling technologies such as vectoring and G.fast, which promise to boost the speeds possible on FTTC lines. Results of BT’s vectoring trials, said to take the top download speed possible on FTTC up to 100Mbps, are expected to be announced later this year.
As well as increasing customers download speeds overall, vectoring could see those unlucky few who can’t order an Extra Box service able to do so.
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