Sky UK to Scrap Sky Live 4K Smart Camera for Sky Glass After Just 2 Years

Customers of Sky Glass, which uses your broadband and WiFi connection to stream on-demand video and live TV channels directly to Sky’s own brand TV sets (without a satellite dish), have been informed that if they also took out the £290 dedicated 4K HDR smart camera add-on (Sky Live) then this will shortly become an expensive paper weight.

The Sky Live camera was originally launched in June 2023 (here) – designed exclusively for use with Sky Glass (it magnetically attached to the top of their TV sets) – and included various features, such as video calling via Zoom, noise-cancelling technology to improve audio clarity and group watching (i.e. syncing the show you’re watching with friends/family in another location, while still allowing video chats – max of 12 people on one call).

The device, which used a 12MP (Megapixel) wide-angle 106-degree Field of View (FoV) camera that connected to Sky Glass via both USB-C and HDMI ports, also featured movement sensors to help support video gaming and exercise, as well as auto-framing technology to help follow users around the room.

Sounds good, right? Well, you’d hope so for £290 a pop, although this cost could alternatively be spreading across a 48 or 24-month contract term. But in a somewhat shocking twist for such recent hardware, Sky yesterday began informing customers that Sky Live will “cease to operate on 4th December [2025]“!

Sky UK Statement

From today, 4th November, Sky Live customers will start to be notified that Sky Live will cease to operate on 4th December.

Innovation has always been at the heart of Sky, finding new ways to make the TV experience even better for our customers. Sky Live was part of that journey, and we’re proud of the ambition behind it. It’s given us valuable learnings that are helping to shape the future of our products.

We have, however, made the difficult decision to discontinue it, in order to focus our investment on what matters most to customers. In the past few years, we’ve launched the next generation of Sky Glass TVs in Gen 2 & Air, which we continue to make even smarter through new updates to Sky OS. We have the UK’s fastest broadband speeds from any major provider, and we’ve launched 5 star rated home insurance with Sky Protect.

We understand this news may be disappointing to people who have enjoyed using Sky Live, and we’re sorry about that.

We also know our customers have loved the Sky Live games, and so we’ve invested in bringing more games to Sky Glass & Stream for all customers to enjoy. There’s something for everyone in the family, including the newly released Who Wants to be a Millionaire, arcade games like PacMan, child-friendly games from Teletubbies and Spongebob, as well as card and strategy games like Solitaire and Chess.

The good news, if you can call it that, is Sky aren’t just going to say “we’re sorry about that” and then run off with your money, which might potentially have landed them in some legal hot water with a number of consumer protection rules.

Sky Live customers will thus be “entitled to a refund for the value that they have paid towards their Sky Live device“, this will automatically be sent to the direct debit on their Sky Account or, if they paid in full, the card used to make the purchase within 3 weeks of the 4th November.

Sky are also offering further information and ways to either recycle or return the Sky Live device once this process completes – here. Sadly, Sky doesn’t clarify why they’ve decided to give up on Sky Live so soon after launching it, which is an incredibly unusual thing to do. But we can speculate that its adoption was probably fairly low, and thus the cost of maintaining the surrounding ecosystem may have ceased to make much sense.