Movistar plus+ will brick thousands of spanish smart tvs on 1 april
Spanish households who bought a Samsung or LG television between 2012 and 2016 are about to discover that their screen has an expiry date. On 1 April the operator’s over-the-top app will refuse to open on any set that cannot run Android TV 6.0 or newer, cutting off access to LaLiga, Champions League and the flagship Movistar Plus+ catalogue unless they buy a €35 dongle or accept a new 12-month contract.
The move mirrors Netflix’s February purge of pre-2013 sets, but with a twist: Movistar is still marketing the same €9.99 no-commitment plan to new customers while quietly emailing existing ones to warn that their hardware is obsolete. The subject line: “Your television will stop being compatible”.
Which models are being switched off?
According to the internal compatibility list seen by this outlet, the guillotine falls on every Samsung smart TV sold from 2012 to 2015, the LG webOS 2.0 line launched in 2016, and Sony Bravia sets stuck on Android TV 5.x. Even the high-end Samsung BD-K8500 Blu-ray player, once promoted as the operator’s 4K hub, will turn into a paperweight. Customers who open the app today see a full-screen countdown: “14 days left”.
The technical excuse is a mandatory upgrade to the operator’s new HEVC Main 10 pipeline and a DRM stack that older chipsets cannot decode. Engineers familiar with the project say the decision was taken last October, when the company calculated that maintaining legacy firmware was costing €1.2 million per year in CDN surcharges and customer-support calls.
A quiet price hike disguised as progress
Industry analysts point out that the timing is convenient. Movistar raised the price of its Sports and Motor packs by €6 a month in January, blamed inflation, and is now nudging users toward a two-year decoder rental at €10 a month that conveniently includes the updated OS. The operator’s own FAQ suggests a Fire TV Stick 4K Max as the cheapest escape hatch, an Amazon product that also happens to be promoted on Movistar’s checkout page with an affiliate code.
Consumer watchdog Facua has already filed a preliminary complaint with the Spanish markets regulator, arguing that the unilateral termination of service on functioning hardware may violate the 2021 national transposition of the EU’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive. The fine print in last year’s terms-and-conditions update, however, gives Movistar the right to “modify technical requirements” with 30 days’ notice.
How to keep watching without buying a new tv
For households determined to stay put, the workaround is blunt: plug in a €35 Google TV Streamer or a second-hand Chromecast Ultra and cast from the phone app. Picture purists will notice the 1080p upscaling limit on 2014 sets, but the football still flows. A more radical option is to cancel and switch to DAZN plus a la carte; together they cost €29.98 and work on any browser.
The company refuses to publish the exact number of affected sets, but market data provider Kantar estimates 1.3 million Samsung and 600,000 LG televisions still in primary use fall inside the kill-zone. If even half of those customers swallow the decoder upgrade, Movistar will book an extra €93 million in annual rental revenue. That is the real upgrade being streamed into living rooms this spring.