EE’s latest figures show that bundle deals and the new EE TV service helped to push broadband subscriber numbers up by 50,000 in the last three months.
The UK’s fifth biggest ISP by subscriber size now has 884,000 broadband customers, which EE describes as its ‘best ever’ net additions.
Should BT’s bid for EE be approved then EE’s recent surge will only cement BT’s position at the top of the market.
BT currently has around 7.5 million broadband customers in the UK, comfortably above Sky, which has roughly 5.53 million broadband subscribers in the UK and Ireland. Absorbing EE’s customers would see BT’s total consumer base swell to roughly 8.4 million.
Neal Milsom, chief financial officer of EE, said: “As much of the UK market now has smartphones, we are leading the charge into new growth areas by cross-selling our innovative range of connected products including 4G tablets, 4G WiFi, fixed broadband and EE TV to our existing customers.”
New promotions including EE Film Club, which offers customers movie rentals for £1, the new EE Power portable chargers plus (finally) integrated WiFi Calling on certain phones will also likely help reduce churn and attract new customers to EE’s various bundles of services.
While BT is bidding for both EE’s mobile and broadband customers, it’s not clear if EE Broadband would be fully integrated into BT’s network, or whether it would continue to be run as a separate entity, like the BT-owned Plusnet is.
If the former happened then it’s not clear what would happen to EE TV, which is essentially a rival to connected TV platform YouView, which is what BT TV is based on. That said, EE has been making good on its word to quickly bring apps to its TV service – it got BBC Connected Red Button mere months after launch, a feat which had taken YouView nearly two years to get working.
EE TV customers can now also get the full range of content from Now TV on their boxes. Now TV, Sky’s streaming service lets non-Sky TV customers stream shows like Game of Thrones, Mad Men and Penny Dreadful with an Entertainment Pass (£6.99/month) live Premier League football with a Sports Pass (£10.99/week) or the latest blockbusters with Sky Movies (£9.99/month). Currently, you can only get Now TV Movies passes working on YouView boxes.
That said, we’re still waiting on EE to add things like Netflix and ITV Player not to mention improvements to its native Restart and Replay features.
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