BT TV sets Ultra HD channel pricing | 4K/UltraHD

Thus, subscribers willing to spend the extra £ will also get their hands on the regular BT Sport Pack, all Freeview channels, 47 “premium” channels access to a bunch of catch-up services and of course the monthly 4K programming that’s going to grow as the year goes by.

BT Sport Ultra HD is the next step in high definition TV and provides a truly cinematic viewing experience and is available only on BT TV.

The new channel will launch with live coverage of the FA Community Shield match at Wembley on August 2nd between Chelsea and Arsenal. This will be followed by the first game of the Barclays Premier League season with Manchester United vs Tottenham Hotspur at Old Trafford on Saturday 8th August, but BT Sport Ultra HD will also be showing other games from the UEFA Champions League, Barclays Premier League, FA Cup, Aviva Premiership Rugby and MotoGP all in glorious 4K.

The new BT Sport Ultra HD channel is part of the Entertainment Ultra HD package at £15 a month. This is partly down to the 4K multicast stream which needs 20 to 30 Mbps, but with live encoding you often see bursty performance so building in a large bandwidth margin helps to ensure no-one sees dropped frames and as BT Sport is live there is no opportunity to buffer content locally.

For comparison, the most expensive package right now is “Entertainment Plus” at £10 per month, so you’ll effectively be paying an extra £5 on top of that for 4K sport and 22 additional premium channels.

“We are immensely proud of the partnership with BT to deliver the first Ultra HD set top box in the UK”. It will also feature a new AMC drama and movie channel that is launching in August.

Ultra HD offers a picture quality that is up to four times sharper than HD, making it the star attraction of BT’s Ultra HD TV bundle offering.

Interested customers will require BT Infinity broadband for all of the above packages. BT is offering some restitution, however, in the form of a £500 voucher to put towards the purchase of an LG 4K TV – just in case that’s the final missing piece of the puzzle you haven’t thought about yet.