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YouView times two: BT customers can now watch YouView in different rooms with the option of a bonus box for an extra £5 per month — that should solve a few arguments when the World Cup kicks off any day.
BT’s Extra Box plugs into a telly in a different room to your main TV, so you can watch, record and catch up on your favourite shows while family or housemates get on with enjoying completely different viewing elsewhere in the house. BT catches up with rival UK pay-TV broadcasters Sky and Virgin Media’s multi-room set-ups that allow customers to watch different things around the house.
More on YouView and TV tech
- YouView adds Yesterday and Really – yes really – to catch-up
- New YouView box is free on TalkTalk, but doesn’t record
- HD movies now available to buy and keep on BT YouView
- Sky Store movie rentals open to all, also on YouView
- Sky+HD 2TB box with Wi-Fi makes the sky the limit
Almost, anyway: BT customers can only have two YouView boxes per household. Meanwhile Virgin’s Multi-room allows up to five extra TVs and Sky’s Multiscreen allows for as many as eight extra Sky HD boxes (or four Sky+HD boxes), so even the biggest families can avoid interacting with each other.
The second BT YouView box does all the things your main box does, including seven-day catch-up TV, pause, record and rewind, and it’s in sync with your subscriptions so it automatically shows all the same channels and bolt-ons that you’re already getting on your main TV.
In order to have two YouView+ boxes in your home, you need to have BT Infinity broadband topping 34Mbps. Use of a second box costs £5 extra on top of your BT contract, with a twelve-month subscription — but the big catch is that you have to pay £100 up-front for the second box.
If you’re a BT customer and you have a BT Vision box supplying your televisual entertainment, then you’re stuck with one box for the moment but you can switch to YouView for £35.
