Just over a year after the £16.5 billion merger of British telco groups Vodafone UK and Three UK, VodafoneThree has announced the launch of a new TV offering, which will go live next month. The move will add another major player to the UK’s pay-TV market, alongside the likes of Sky, Virgin Media O2, and BT.
Traditional pay-TV subscriptions continue to decline in the UK. Ofcom’s latest Media Nations report found that pay-TV household penetration was down by three percentage points year-on-year to 30 percent in Q1 this year, down from a peak of 54 percent in 2016. But revenues haven’t fared as badly as subscription figures — pay-TV revenues actually grew in 2025 to £6.22 billion, up from £5.99 billion the previous year.
And VodafoneThree sees a TV offering as a way to drive overall revenue and subscription growth, providing opportunities to cross-sell its TV bundle to mobile and broadband customers, according to the Financial Times.
Leaning on streaming
One of the opportunities outlined by Ofcom’s report for pay-TV providers is bundling streaming services into their packages, helping audiences deal with rising streaming costs. And VodafoneThree will lean into this strategy for its new TV service.
Vodafone TV will include subscriptions to Netflix and HBO Max, while customers will also be able to add further subscriptions to the likes of Disney+, DAZN, and Prime Video to their package. Linear channels meanwhile will come via access to Freely, the joint streaming hub launched by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5, alongside a further 150+ live channels.
The telco is positioning the new service as a wider entertainment hub, with music streaming and gaming also integrated into the platform. It will also release a companion app for mobile, which will be synced to the Vodafone TV set-top box, meaning profiles, recommendations, favourites, and gameplay are all mirrored across devices. Subscribers will also be able to pause programmes on their TV set and then pick up viewing at a later point via the mobile app.
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