Owners of UK ISP BT’s latest TV set-top-box hardware (TV Box Pro) for their broadband-based Pay TV (IPTV) service may be pleased to learn that they’ve added a new “internet mode“, which enables you to access TV shows, browse channels and apps all in one place, without the need for a TV aerial. BT also added a multiroom box.
The change means that, when a customer sets up their BT TV Box Pro for the first time, they’ll now be given the option to either connect via “internet mode” (i.e. all TV channels are streamed live) or “aerial mode“. Alternatively, if already an existing BT TV Box Pro customer, then there is no need for them to change, however they will still receive an automatic software update allowing them to reset their connectivity settings if required in the future.
Admittedly, the STB is already somewhat of a combination between on-demand streaming and terrestrial reception, but if you’re happy with your home broadband connection then you could now completely forget about using the aerial at all.
However, it’s worth noting that streamed TV channels often seem to suffer a little bit more latency than those broadcast via an aerial, so remember that when you’re watching a live sports match and wonder why others are responding to something a few moments before you’re able to see the same event.
Sharon Meadows, BT’s Propositions Director, said:
“We continue to look for ways to enhance the TV experience for our customers. Removing the need for an aerial connection not only gives even more consumers the opportunity to take out BT TV, it also gives our customers even more flexibility with their TV set-up, allowing them to access great content, from anywhere in the home.”
BT is also introducing the TV Box Mini, a new multiroom compact TV box, which lets customers watch TV in an extra room of the house (e.g. the same or different shows at the same time). The BT TV Box Mini works just like the BT TV Box Pro, connecting to the Smart Hub router via Wi-Fi, so customers can watch their favourite channels without the need for an aerial.
The BT TV Box Mini is available for existing BT TV Box Pro customers for an additional £10 per month.
BT informs that customers can only have one TV Box Mini unit, which may limit those with bigger homes and deeper pockets.
Can you have more than one mini box, this is why I haven’t switched from Sky to BT..
BT said.. “confirming it’s limited to just one,” so no you can’t use more.
There wasn’t a limit on the trials.
It’s a commercial decision not a technical
While I don’t use an aerial for TV as I don’t have a licence, people who already use one, what would the advantage be of streaming live TV? While the quality of Freeview is not great, it is normally reliable in most places. I can understand when the signal is naff, going for streaming. I presume that BT box has a hard drive in, so people can pause and record, or have they done away with that now? I doubt people will get any better quality on streaming their shows that they do on Freeview.
If I had a TV licence and watched normal TV I doubt I would use streaming for watching normal content, I would use the signal via the aerial and if I stick a hard drive or a USB stick in the back of the T.V, I could pause. I would also get another PVR if my old digital stream fail to work due to it’s age.
Well BT TV is a pay TV service and you can’t get pay TV over aerial.
For some reason the bandwidth available to Freeview keeps getting squeezed, pushing HD channels out, delivering over IP has no real bandwidth constraints in terms of total channels available. There are also people who rent houses and might not have an aerial, or are in a new build where the aerial cables have been installed but the aerial itself hasn’t, and getting an IP service avoids all the costs of having an aerial installer come out.
My concerns would be over latency as it’s not fun watching the world cup and being 20-30s behind the terrestrial or satellite feeds, and also wanting the ability to see news broadcasts if something catastrophic happens and the Internet infrastructure suffers an attack.
As Jonny points out, allot of new builds I’ve seen/lived in don’t come with one and even then may only have sockets in the living room and master bedroom.
In the past we’ve had to mess around getting cabling into the different rooms where we wanted TV, going through ceilings and walls.
In my current house which didn’t come with one, since we have streaming and Sky Q, I only put a basic antenna in the loft and wired it to the living room as a backup (was still annoying though as the cable was chucked into a corner under insulation). To get it done professionally though would have cost about £100 for 1 one room and £200-300 for the whole house.
Indoor antennas can also be a pain even when you can get a signal, I’ve had to rotate the antenna depending on which channels I wanted to watch.
Though paying £17 per month to watch freeview (Yes I know it comes with Entertainment channels as well) is a bit expensive.
I will stick with my Plex DVR, it allows me to watch freeview anywhere in the world, which is handy as I travel a lot and the best part it only cost me £45 for a life time pass (They have deals during the year).
this is for BT’s current and potential future TV customers. The aerial requirement has long been a problem and unlike Sky, there’s not really the budget to come out and install a free TV aerial for channels that they don’t get paid for, and if you’re in a flat with a dodgy aerial system there’s not much you can do anyway.
If you don’t have a TV licence you can’t use BT TV anyway, so it’s irrelevant to you.
It now puts them on a more level playing field with something like Sky Glass, which doesn’t need a dish.
But don’t you still need an antenna and a compatible tuner to stream Freeview via Plex?
@Tech3475 I own two properties, one has an TV aerial and the other doesn’t. So I have my Plex server at the property that has the aerial and that way I can view channels not only on my TV without the aerial, but also when I’m away on business in the US. It also saves having to use a VPN for iplayer.
It looks like BT’s service offers around 14 HD channels that aren’t available on Freeview (many were locked behind a Sky paywall – e.g. ITV2 HD etc). Whether they’re channels you want to watch or not is another matter of course!
It’s probably cheaper to pay £17pm for Freeview IPTV than it is to buy a second property just for Freeview IPTV ;).
@tech3475 Actually the house came before thinking about using freeview from it, wished I had known about Plex DVR many years ago.
@Jonny, digital terrestrial TV in the Uk was rubbish right from the start, I had ITV digital and remember the problems with that and Top up TV. I know Freeview improved it a bit, but to be honest it is still rubbish with more and more channels added and less and less space for them. But we still need some sort of terrestrial system, there are people out there that don’t have broadband and have no interest in getting it, people should not be forced to watch online. Everything I watch is online as I said, I have no TV licence, so I use streaming services and YouTube. Sadly it is not just TV that suffers from this over compression to fit as much ad they can in a small space, DAB radio is the same, this is why I still listen on FM, far better than DAB.
Is this new BT box still based on You View> That was awful, I remember the first You View boxes, slow and unreliable and from what I have seen still not much better now. Freeview play is better if you have a decent box or TV that supports it, but still have problems, the fact that you can’t do certain things on HD channels, like go back to the start of the programme, but need to be on a SD channel. I mucked about with it on my brother’s TV when I set it up, and it is not good. When I got my TV, I put the aerial in for 10 minutes just to check the tuner is working and then took it back out, removed the plug again and detuned the T, so I saw about 2 minutes of a channel if that. A few years ago plusnet got in contact with me about their TV service, fair play to them, when I said I don’t even have a Tv licence, they never contacted me again. People who go to BT pay for this TV service, even if they don’t haveit, that is why BT cost so much more than other providers. Like Sky users subsidise sport channels for other people.
Actually the quality of these streamed channels is vastly superior to their counterparts using the aerial.
https://www.bt.com/help/tv/guide/ip-freeview-guide I think bt might have the best solution here for once, you can still record, aren’t tied to a stupid TV, and can still get a multi room service.
HD channels were forced off Freeview as the Government sold the bandwidth to mobile providers. BBC Four will return to HD in most areas but not, alas BBC News Channel. So blame the politicians if we must but nice to get a better mobile service – my O2 in London is rubbish
the extended HD service (beyond 101-105) was only ever intended to be temporary, it used equipment that was made redundant from the digital switch over process and coverage was very limited. This also meant it was much cheaper for smaller broadcasters to buy capacity.
IIRC the idea was that more channels would encourage people to buy a Freeview HD TV/box and then that would allow them to do another “switchover” of all remaining channels, including a much more efficient transmission standard.
Though they could turn off the main 5 SD channels as they already have HD versions and therefore would give bandwidth for further HD. Is there a reason for SD channels these days (apart from bandwidth limitations)?
HD reception in the UK requires DVB-T2, the second revision of the digital TV standard, and support for MP4. And TVs last a long time, especially in more elderly households.
If your TV only has DVB-T and MPEG2/4 – as many sets which were manufactured a decade or so ago, around the time of the digital transition – you’ll lose reception if everything moves to HD, unless you get a box to convert it, just as analogue-only boxes lost reception before that.
Not sure if HD channels require more bandwidth than SD, despite the improvement in algorithm – I suspect it depends on the precise encoding redundancy options used to transmit it, but DVB-T2 can produce ~50-67% higher bitrate for a given bandwidth, and is usually combined with a more efficient algorithm (MP4 rather than MPEG2).
(It is possible to transit HD over DVB-T, usually encoded as MPEG4, but AFAIK this is not done in the UK.)
The first switchover to HD happened in 2008 in the UK, so a lot longer than a decade ago and this is why this country ends up being so far behind other countries, especially considering many other countries are now transmitting 4K channels in their version of freeview.
The rest of Europe used DVTB-T2 and MPEG4 for SD AND HD. Most notably Italy has done this with great success, and have masses and masses of channels. Hundreds.
We are stuck with MPEG2 for SD which is ancient. This is the root of DTT’s problems in the UK. I really wish we’d just get with the times and switch.
I just tested latency by looking at the clock change on the BBC News ticker. I can’t detect anything discernible between Freesat and the IP stream via BT TV.
The latency is good because it is multicast.
I just did a side by side comparison of BBC1 live through an aerial and BBC1 live through the IPTV box and it’s probably about 0.5 seconds or less.
Is everyone seeing the option to switch it over to internet? I don’t appear to have it yet.
You can force an update by doing a factory reset. See: https://rxtvinfo.com/2022/bt-ditches-the-aerial-for-revamped-tv-service
Is this IP Streaming a multicast thing that BT are doing, or is it a wider YouView thing please? For example if I buy a BT Pro box on eBay and plug it in to my Vodafone broadband connection. Would I get the option to stream the (freeview only) channels too?
it uses the BT multicast platform so you would need to be a BT broadband subscriber to even have access to the streams.
Before it launched people had found the stream IP addresses and noted that unlike the “BT TV Preview” channel, they cannot be played in VLC, implying that they are encrypted and requiring a BT TV subscription.
As with all other BT boxes you probably could still use it for Freeview through an aerial, but that defeats the purpose
Of course it’s also worth pointing out that virtually all BT hardware is rented now, in line with Sky and Virgin, so anything you see on eBay is not the property of the seller anyway.
@Ivor Thanks for that. Yeah I did some digging and you’re right. It looks like they just repurposed the multicast channels that were previously used for the subscription channels after moving away from that and to the Now TV Platform instead. It’s a shame that they’re not only exclusive to BT’s network but also encrypted. I thought we FINALLY had a solution for watching and recording Freeview without an aerial nor subscription, but sadly not!
Yeah, on second thoughts having seen that hardware remains the property of BT I wouldn’t be happy with buying that kit online anyways. I’m actually astonished that when doing my research I found that not only do CeX have these BT Pro boxes for sale, but they also have Virgin Media Tivo V6 and 360 boxes listed as well. It’s very well known that these are only loaned to subscribers and probably aren’t even useful to anyone but the original subscriber either. I can’t see that ending well for the store.
@Ivor, nope. That’s not what happened. The Now channels on BTTV are also streamed using BT’s multicast system, so this is extra capacity.
I thought this might be great for me, as I don’t have a TV Aerial in my new build property. Then realised it requires a BT Smart Hub, as well.
I refuse to use the BT Smart Hub with my FTTP service, so it’s a no go for me still.
Works absolutely fine here with a Tplink router although I’m in FTTC.
Have played around with it a bit myself now and it appears to be working with my TP-Link AX11000 router now.
It was BT’s own announcement on their Community Forums that stated it would only work with the BT Smart Hub, but I guess, that’s just so they can support it easier, maybe?
Yeh I guess so. I’ve had mixed results on third party routers but the Tplink one has been rock solid
Why bother though. The latest BT Smart Hub is a good bit of kit.
I agree – it’s an alright bit of kit. However it lacks some features that I require for my home network, so I don’t use it for that reason.
Having the extra customisation available to me through a 3rd party router is essential. I do of course keep hold of the BT Smart Hubs for if/when I need to contact support.
Interesting! Though would be better as a standalone product which didn’t need BT broadband.
* E.g. You could have broadband with a different FTTP provider and then have a BT TV service with more flexibility on the pricing of broadband, timing of contracts to suit your own circumstances and use other/your own broadband equipment/mesh systems etc.
Unfortunately very unlikely. the streams are all delivered as multicast on the BT broadband network.
Updated my Pro box – this is a superb addition (especially with more HD channels added).
My only gripe about BT TV is that it doesn’t utilise the Sky Numbering guide. If we had consistency across the various providers it would be great.
On a different note – obviously BT/EE now feel this is the time to start to a full transition to IP. This is a major counter to the Sky Glass offering and overcomes one of the biggest issues BT has faced securing customers.
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