Sky Stream to be bundled with EE home broadband

Dan Howdle | October 11th, 2024

BT and EE certainly know how to keep their customers on their toes. Not long after binning BT TV altogether to make way for EE TV (a near-identical service with just a few key differences), EE is now going to be offering Sky Stream in its entirety, bundled along with its broadband.

When and how is it happening?

Sky Stream will soon be available to bolt onto your EE broadband package as part of your bundle, replacing EE TV. However, the option to have EE TV instead in all of its forms will remain for now. Here are the finer details:

• Launch date – Starting from 15 October 2024, you can get Sky Stream through EE retail stores, via the EE website, or by calling EE's telesales team
• EE Broadband + Sky Stream – EE customers will be able to bundle Sky Stream with their EE home broadband, giving customers full access to Sky TV where before NOW TV offered only partial access
• More content with Sky Stream – Sky Stream gives you access to over 100,000 hours of programming, with more than 150 channels, and apps like Disney+, Apple TV, BBC iPlayer, and YouTube all available on the Sky Stream Puck
• No satellite dish required – Sky Stream works over Wi-Fi (or a LAN cable), so there’s no need for a satellite dish. Just plug it in, connect it to your TV, and you’re good to go
• Pricing – Sky Stream packages start at £20 per month, which includes Sky Entertainment and Netflix, offering good value for money. It will be interesting to see if an EE broadband and Sky Stream bundle can match that – we'll know on 15 October when pricing is revealed

The implications for EE TV and NOW TV

EE TV is a complicated product with its different boxes and varying methods of delivering content. NOW TV is quite a complicated product all by itself, and that only forms the core channels of EE TV.

Rather than simply ditching its own TV service, EE plans to offer Sky Stream as another alternative when choosing what goes in your bundle, adding a further layer of complication.

No matter how EE TV chooses to bundle its TV packages, it is never, ever going to be as comprehensive a package as Sky Stream. We've watched them struggle with this from its BT TV days all the way through to now, and 'if you can't beat them, join them' was always going to be where we ended up.

The fact you can get Sky Stream on its own means anyone can get an EE broadband deal (or any other provider) without a TV package and just get a separate Sky Stream subscription. It is and was similar money or less to go this route and you'd end up with a superior TV service to EE TV, which up till now has been stuck with clunky old NOW TV at its core. Offering Sky Stream in an EE broadband bundle is an admission that battle has been lost on the one hand, but also just plain sensible.

Conclusion

EE cannot keep offering its complex TV product alongside Sky Stream forever. Not only because it's hard to understand, but also because EE TV is inferior to Sky Stream.

That inferiority has NOW TV (Sky's chopped-down streaming app) at its core. You can heap just about every boost and add-on available with NOW TV and it'll be more expensive than, and still not as good as, Sky Stream.

One way to look at this then is as possibly the first moves in Sky eventually phasing out NOW TV, starting here by offering a better alternative to its partners.

Because NOW TV is having a harder and harder time finding its own space in the market since Sky Stream launched. Sky Stream is considerably better stocked, offers higher quality video and audio as standard, comes in the form of its own neat little set-top box and allows you all the flexibility of streaming anywhere with the Sky Go app. It all just leads us to ask what on Earth NOW TV is for now Sky Stream has entered the room.

And we're pretty certain Sky must be asking itself this same question. Because the very first thing we would do if we were planning some future NOW TV rug-pull would be to ensure our partners were able to offer an alternative.