BT Sport launch new channels for more football coverage.

BT Sport has launched some new channels to coincide with its three year deal to show exclusively live all 351 matches from the Champions league and Europa league.

BT Sport paid £897m to beat ITV and Sky to the rights to the Champions League with the deal due to run for three seasons.

The new BT Sport Showcase channel, will be available to Freeview, EE TV and YouView users, will show at least 26 European football matches for free every season.

BT Sport Showcase will show a “minimum of 12 UEFA Champions League matches and 14 UEFA Europa League matches.”

BT Sport Showcase also confirmed that “each participating British team will be shown at least once. ”

BT Sport Europe SD/HD launches 1st August 2015, and will become the home of Champions League and Europa League football.

Gary Lineker, Jake Humphrey and Rio Ferdinand will front the live UEFA Champions League coverage.

They will join the BT Sport team which includes Paul Scholes, Michael Owen, Steve McManaman and Owen Hargreaves, as well as new signings Steven Gerrard, Harry Redknapp, Glenn Hoddle and Howard Webb.

ESPN in the UK is now known as BT Sport ESPN

As a result of these launches, BT channel numbers on the Sky TV platform have shuffled around.

•BT Sport 1: 413 / 427
•BT Sport Europe: 414 / 433
•BT Sport 2: 417 / 457
•BT Sport ESPN: 426 / 458

BT Broadband and BT’s TV service viewers will continue access BT Sport 1, 2, BT Sport Europe and BT Sport ESPN for free. Access to the HD versions of these channels will now cost £4 extra a month.

For non BT Broadband customers, via satellite / Sky, the current price per month for BT Sport 1, 2, and BT Sport ESPN is 13.50 per month, and £4 per month extra for HD. The cost of the new package including BT Sports Europe is currently unknown.

BT Sports will also be launching a new BT Sports Ultra HD service.

BT’s new Ultra HD sports channel will be made available to viewers with BT Infinity and BT’s YouView service.

The Community Shield will be the first broadcast on the new channel, with other live events shown throughout the season, including selected games from the UEFA Champions League, Barclays Premier League, FA Cup and Aviva Premiership Rugby.

Ultra HD promises to offer a picture quality 4x that of HD.

Viewers signing up for the new channel will receive a new 4K/UHD YouView box, which will allow up to 600 hours of recordings in standard definition or 250 hours of HD content, with 1TB of storage. Due to the high bandwidth requirements for the channel, the service will only be delivered to BT Infinity users. Viewers will need to have a 4K/UHD ready TV for the service.