BT says it added 63,000 new TV customers in the three months ending September 2016, taking its total subscriber base to 1.7m.
The company provides TV services through its BT, EE and Plusnet brands and has been investing heavily in sports content and, through its partnership with AMC, US dramas.
Subscribers to the largest of the group’s TV platforms, BT TV, get exclusive access to shows such as Fear The Walking Dead, Into The Badlands, Feed The Beast and, from next year, The Terror which are all shown on the AMC channel.
Today’s results cements BT’s place as the UK’s third largest provider of pay-TV, behind Virgin Media and Sky.
Both BT and Plusnet branded TV operations use the YouView platform but EE’s nascent TV service uses set top boxes and software provided by Netgem.
Speculation has persisted since BT’s purchase of EE that the company would eventually migrate the mobile firm’s TV platform to YouView, which BT part-owns and is reportedly looking to takeover in its entirety.
This speculation is likely to be boosted by news that the firm is trialling the sale of BT-branded TV and broadband services in 20 EE high street stores around the UK.
BT completed its takeover of EE earlier this year, giving it access to around 600 stores.
Although the company has played down talk of ditching the EE brand, the trials could point to possible plans to focus EE as a purely mobile brand in the longterm, with the network’s fixed broadband and TV products eventually being replaced by BT branded equivalents.
