Sky's Now TV box is a £9.99 Roku clone that streams iPlayer and more
BSkyB started investing in Roku last year and it's leveraged that involvement to develop this new Now TV set-top box. Going on sale today for just £9.99 (including shipping), it brings a rebranded Roku 2 XS …
Context & Ripple Effects
BSkyB's move is a direct payoff of its position in Roku's cap table: the broadcaster joined News Corp in backing Roku's $45 million funding round in July 2012, when Roku was positioning itself as the streaming box of choice for pay TV providers rather than just a cord-cutter toy.
Roku had already done the UK groundwork — it brought the BBC iPlayer channel along when it started shipping there in February 2012. The Now TV box converts that footprint into Sky's own hardware: a rebranded Roku 2 XS sold at £9.99 including shipping, an aggressive price even next to the $50 LT Roku launched in 2011. The pickup across The Verge, AllThingsD, iMore and Sky's own community forums shows how closely this hybrid play — a pay TV giant shipping an OTT box — was watched.
First-order effects
- Sky gains a near-giveaway hardware on-ramp to its Now TV streaming service, letting it reach UK households that would never take a satellite dish or a full subscription.
- Roku turns its investor relationship into an OEM licensing win — BSkyB effectively pays Roku twice, as shareholder and as platform supplier.
Second-order effects
- Other UK pay TV and connected-TV players are forced to answer a £9.99 price point for a full streaming box, compressing margins in a category where Roku already set the low bar with its $50 LT model.
- BBC iPlayer sitting natively on Sky-branded hardware blurs the line between Sky's walled garden and free public-service catch-up, pressuring rivals whose boxes can't match that content mix.
Third-order effects
- Pay TV operators are shifting from treating streamers as a threat to owning them — using cheap third-party hardware as a subscriber funnel, with the operator brand on top and the platform vendor underneath.
- If the pattern holds, streaming platforms consolidate around licensed stacks: hardware margins vanish, and value moves to whoever controls the software layer and content billing relationship.
The trend: Pay TV broadcasters are absorbing over-the-top streaming rather than fighting it, buying stakes in platform vendors like Roku and shipping their own ultra-cheap boxes to protect the subscription relationship.