Want to watch BT Sport mobile on your TV?

If you’re a BT Broadband subscriber, you’ll probably know that you can watch BT Sport for free on mobile devices as part of your subscription. 

You’ll also know that if you want to watch BT Sport on the 40in panel of pixels in your living room, you have to pay The Man. Unless, that is, you know of a workaround to watch BT Sport mobile on your TV, like the ones we’re about to show you…

How to watch BT Sport mobile on your TV using Samsung Galaxy phones

 If you own a recent Samsung handset (Samsung Galaxy S7 upwards) you’ll have a feature called Smart View available from the menu that appears when you drag your finger downwards from the top of the screen (see screenshot below). It’s on the second screen of options on my S9, so keep swiping if you don’t see it immediately.

Tap on that with the BT Sport app running and you’ll get the option to mirror the phone’s screen to Samsung’s range of smart television or (more handily) streaming devices, such as the Roku 3 I have connected in my office. Voila! Peter Crouch and chums are streamed on your TV screen.

Smart View has been improved recently. Previously, the phone’s screen continued playing the video, draining your handset’s battery. Now the screen goes black after a few seconds, although you can’t use the phone for anything else – such as making a call or bashing out tweets – without disrupting the video stream.

The viewing experience isn’t perfect. We are not talking Full HD streaming, let alone 4K resolutions, and the frame rate is decidedly choppy. That said, it is watchable and certainly a better option than squinting at a smartphone screen or handing BT another slice of your hard earned.

To improve streaming quality, we strongly suggest you connect both your phone and the receiving device (ie. the Roku) to the 5GHz band on your wireless router, if possible. This minimises the chance of wireless interference disrupting the action.

How to watch BT Sport mobile on your TV using other Android phones

When we first wrote this article in 2017, we said that BT Sport blocked the use of Chromecast to beam the phone’s screen to the TV on any Android phone.

The Chromecast option remains greyed out in our BT Sport app on a Samsung Galaxy handset to this day in April 2019, but other readers say it is possible.

“I can cast from my Moto G5+ to my TV,” writes Jake D Arnott in the comments at the foot of this article. “Strictly SD [picture quality], but not too bad.”

The wonderfully named ‘Huh’ agrees, claiming “the BT Sport app has the Chromecast button enabled on both my custom ROM OPO as well as my very much stock Nexus 7 tablet.”

So, if you don’t have a Samsung handset, it’s certainly worth seeing if you can Chromecast. Devices such as the Amazon Fire TV Stick and the aforementioned Roku accept Chromecast streams, as do some smart TVs, so you might not need to go out and buy another receiving device.

How to stream BT Sport mobile from an iPhone/iPad to a TV

If you’re an iPhone or iPad owner, there are Apple-flavoured ways you can beam BT Sport from your phone to the TV.

First, it’s worth emphasising the point that the BT Sport app works on the iPad, so if you can watch the action on a relatively decent-sized screen without any faffing around. The largest iPad Pro comes with a nigh-on 13in screen, which is what we used to call a portable TV in old money.

If you only have an iPhone, you can use Air Play to beam the BT Sport video from your phone to an Apple TV connected to your television. The new Apple TV has gone up to around £150, but if you scour eBay you’ll find older, third-generation devices knocking about for less than £50.

Another option is to purchase Apple’s (scandalously priced) Lightning Digital AV adapter for around £50. This lets you mirror the phone’s display on your TV via a regular HDMI cable. I’ve not used one myself and there are a few complaints of faulty adapters on the Apple website, so maybe use this as a last resort.

Now read this: Streaming the football? How far will you lag behind live?