Movistar plus+ pulls the plug on older tvs: april 1 blackout looms
Thousands of Spanish living rooms are about to go dark. Movistar Plus+ will brick its app on Samsung sets bought between 2012-2015 and a handful of LG and Sony models starting 1 April, forcing viewers to either buy a streaming stick or cancel the €9.99 plan.
The fine-print e-mail nobody asked for
The carrier has begun peppering inboxes with a laconic heads-up: “Your television will no longer be compatible with the latest version of Movistar Plus+.” Translation: the operator’s new OTT stack needs Widevine L1 DRM and Android TV 6.0 as a floor, and your ageing Tizen or webOS panel can’t fake it. If the app is already installed it will keep running—until the next firmware nudge kills the handshake.
Engineers I spoke to at the Mobile World Congress last month shrugged: legacy support costs scale exponentially while silicon vendors stop patching BSPs after six years. Movistar’s bean-counters simply drew the same line Netflix drew three weeks ago when it torched 2011-2014 Samsung and Roku boxes.
What dies on easter monday
Samsung’s entire 2012-2015 smart-TV line, plus the BD-K8500 and BD-KM85 Blu-ray decks, are first against the wall. LG sets from 2016 lose 4K streaming and drop to 720p. Anything running Google TV or Android TV needs at least Marshmallow (v6.0) from 2015 onward. If your set falls outside those guardrails, the native app vanishes from the store and already-installed copies will refuse to launch after the token refresh.
The move strands roughly 1.3 million households, according to market tracker Barlovento Comunicación. That is a chunky 18 % of Movistar Plus+’s active OTT base—subscribers who deliberately cut the operator’s set-top box out of the chain to save €7 a month in router rental.
Workarounds that cost less than a new panel
You do not need to junk the TV. A 30 € Fire TV Stick Lite or the new Google TV Streamer (€70) sidesteps the block; both handle the fresh DRM chain and output 4K HDR. HDMI-CEC lets you keep the original remote. For the stubborn, an old Chromecast still casts from the Android phone app, though you will kiss channel-surfing goodbye.
Movistar’s comms team insists the refresh brings “a faster grid, personalised hubs and cloud DVR parity with the set-top.” Translation: they want you back on their rented hardware where ARPU is €4 higher.
The bill that keeps growing
This is the second price shock in six months. January’s Sport & Motor pack hike already shoved many onto the basic OTT tier. Now the same tier demands new silicon. Add Spain’s looming fibre price creep and the average household is staring at a €60 annual bump just to watch the same football.
Expect the exodus to speed up. My inbox is already full of readers migrating to DAZN+Fusion bundles or dusting off old Plex servers. The carrier’s Q1 churn report, due 26 April, will tell us how many finally hung up.