Sky Sports Mobile Pass, NOW TV’s cheap (but limited) mobile-only streaming pass, has been cancelled today (Friday). Existing subscribers will be able to use it until their subscription expires, but new customers will not be able to sign up for it.
Update: While the Sports Mobile Pass isn’t being actively promoted, you can still subscribe to it via this direct link.
In addition, NOW TV’s Sky Sports Weekly Pass has been removed as well, leaving only the Day Pass and the Month Pass.
NOW TV is Sky’s streaming TV platform: it works via broadband, and is generally cheaper than a full Sky subscription. The content is divided into “Passes” (Entertainment, Movies, Kids and Sports), and there are no long-term contracts. (See our full NOW TV guide and review here).
The Sky Sports Mobile Pass was introduced two years ago, and at £5.99/month was a cheap alternative to the regular Sky Sports Pass, which normally costs £33.99/month, or £9.99 for a Day Pass.
The Mobile Pass could only be watched on a mobile phone (so not on your TV, tablet or computer), and was limited to only 5 Sky Sports channels – Sky Sports Premier League, Sky Sports Action & Sky Sports Arena, Sky Sports Racing and Sky Sports News.
The regular Sports Pass offers 11 Sky Sports live channels.
In addition to the removal of the Mobile Pass, NOW TV have also cancelled the Weekly Pass option, which used to cost £14.99/week.
Until July, however, NOW TV are offering a discount on the full Sky Sports Month Pass, taking the cost down to £25/month, for up to three months.
We approached NOW TV for comment, and their spokesperson said: “We are constantly evaluating the needs of our customers and our product offering.
“As part of this, NOW TV will no longer be offering the Sky Sports Mobile Month Pass to new customers. The Sky Sports Mobile Month Pass will remain available to existing customers for the foreseeable future.”
NOW TV Dealing With Increased Demand
This major change comes shortly after the return of the Premier League, which brought with it a lot of outrage from NOW TV fans.
On the evening of the first match, the surge in demand caused outages that prevented some people from signing up to NOW TV, while some others, who were already members, were not able to watch the game.
As NOW TV are working to prevent these issues from happening again, it’s hard to say whether the cancellation of the Mobile-only pass is related.
For now, people who tend to watch sporting events on their phone, will still be able to do so with the regular NOW TV app – but will have to pay for the full Sky Sports pass.
Couldn’t watch Burnley/man u match tonight even though I’ve paid. Other matches were available tho….. how’s that. Not happy!
A spokesperson apparently said “We are constantly evaluating the needs of our customers” just stop there, this is purely greed and for a bit more money (hopefully it backfires and they lose money over this and go back to offering the mobile membership), if they really cared about the customers they wouldn’t remove the cheaper mobile membership and force people who can’t afford it to pay £25 per month or £12 per day! I just want to watch Premier League games, I’m going to miss out on Liverpool vs Man Utd today because of this, not good at all.