5BT sport does work on Windows 7

If you have BT sport and try to view it on a Win­dows 7 PC you will find sev­er­al warn­ings and the con­tent may even not play. This is done entirely delib­er­ately by BT (at Microsoft’s behest?) for no tech­nic­al reas­ons what-so-ever. You can eas­ily get it work­ing again

I found that first I was giv­en warn­ings about the “enhanced play­er” and later the mes­sage changed to “It looks like you’re using a old ver­sion of Win­dows. You’ll need to upgrade to Win­dows 8.1 and above to use our web player.”

I use chrome, so I figured I’d simply get chrome to tell the BT webpage that it was run­ning on win­dows 10 by spoof­ing the user agent. After clear­ing the BT cook­ies and using a user agent switch­er I was able to watch BT sport on Chrome 69 on Win­dows 7 (with the enhanced play­er no less) with no prob­lem at all

I use the addon “Chrome UA spoof­er”. I set my user agent to Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.117 Safari/537.36. I must have been using Chrome 66 at the time I fixed this originally.

Simply get your cur­rent user agent by ask­ing google (e.g. mine is cur­rently Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 Safari/537.36) and then replace the Windows NT 6.1 with Windows NT 10.

Add this newly cre­ated user­agent in the Chrome UA spoof­er options. Give your user-agent a name (e.g. Chrome W10), make sure “Replace” is selec­ted rather than “Append”, and use some­thing simple for the indic­at­or flag (e.g. W10).
Then in the “Per­man­ent spoof list” option, add the domain “sport.bt.com” and select your newly cre­ated user­agent from the list.

To clear your cook­ies (in chrome) for just the bt sport site: first load the site (sport.bt.com) and then click on the pad­lock in the address bar. Click on “cook­ies” and then in the list remove all of the entries. You will have to log in again when you next visit.

Now close and reopen chrome, go to BT sport, and log in. You should see the UA Spoof­er icon in the taskbar show a bit of blue text over­layed on itself which will be the “indic­at­or flag” you cre­ated earli­er (i.e. W10). You should find that BT sport now works fully with the enhanced player.

Eng­land Women ‘v’ Aus­tralia Women was on BT sport 1 at the time I wrote this. Above shows it play­ing without prob­lem on Win­dows 7