Sky Stream’s UK Broadband ISP Based TV Service Now Available
As expected, Sky (Sky Broadband) has today made their new standalone Sky Stream TV product available to UK consumers, which uses your home broadband ISP and WiFi connection to stream Sky’s on-demand video content and live TV channels directly to your existing TV without a satellite dish (no engineer install necessary).
The company previously said that Sky Stream would be the “most affordable way to get Sky TV and Netflix together“, with combined packages starting from £26 a month on an 18-month term (£29 for a 31-day term) – this covers Sky Ultimate TV & the Netflix Basic plan.
Customers will also be able to access all the usual Freeview channels, apps (e.g. Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, Disney+, BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub, All4, YouTube, Discovery+, Peacock, Fiit etc.) and Sky’s own premium channels / on-demand content (e.g. Sky Cinema, Sky Sports, BT Sport etc.) via their home internet connection.
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However, there is a £39.95 set-up fee (or £20 if you take an 18-month contract), but next-day delivery is included as standard and there’s a 1-year warranty. As well as the Stream puck, you’ll also receive Sky’s voice remote (control) device. There’s also the option of adding Sky’s Whole Home Pack for an extra £12 a month, which lets you have up to 5 additional Sky Stream devices wherever you’d like in your home.
The Sky Stream boxes (pucks) include 1 x HDMI v2.1 port, 1 x 100Mbps Ethernet (LAN) port and WiFi, while also featuring the same support for 4K, HDR, Dolby Atmos audio and apps as the full Sky Glass product, albeit lacking in local PVR capabilities (it’s cloud based).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Is there a full list of channels that are available on Sky Stream available anywhere?
https://www.sky.com/help/articles/tv-channel-list-sky-glass
With sport packages it is £12 more expensive than regular satellite dish service. I remember someone from Sky explaining that it is expensive because of satellite capacity is very expensive lol.
Hahahahaha nothing to do with the wages of the football players. When Sky bid I think it was 4 or 5 Billion for rights for one of the legumes, a direct result was all the players and staff of the teams got nice pay rises. All on the Sky customer. It sickened me to read they were awarded the F1 coverage till 2029, I watch it through other means and do not pay Sky! I do pay for it still though.
This new service is a dead duck, more expensive and no PVR and you still have contracts.
@Me
I am not paying them. Even if I’d like it would be pointless in my/our case as usually we are out during the weekends, so no live PL, no live F1. Maybe we’ll change our minds in 20 years from now when we’ll be in our 60s. However max price I could pay for full sport packages is no more than £30.
Who care. Sod Sky
Disgracefully expensive for something which requires no installation. Put together a package to rival VM or even Skys own satellite option and its significantly more £
How much?!!!
Virgin Media’s Stream box is much cheaper and 30 day rolling subscriptions not 18 month term. May not have as many channels like Euronews and music channels, but has the main ones you would care about, and large quantity are free and in good quality and default is HD where possible.
At present, I don’t think Virgin Media allows their own ‘Stream’ product to work on other ISPs, which is a key limitation. But I know they’re about to remove that roadblock.
Very easy way of getting out of any long Sky TV contracts. You order this, then cancel and you are free of Sky.
they don’t let you do this. if you are on contract then you have to wait for the contract to end to take the 31 day rolling or you recontract early on the sky stream
@Stewart You might want to tell Sky that then. As it stands and is confirmed by them on their own forums and T&C’s Once you order stream or glass your Sky Q contract is terminated penalty free.
As long as you cancel Sky stream or Glass within 31 days you can then leave with no contract and of course no Sky and nothing to pay.
I was an early adopter and I’m pleased with it. No contract is great!
A word of warning though. The experience is slightly hampered by the CEC HDMI control on the box and it knocking out certain soundbar setups. Even if you turn the HDMI control off, when the box powers off while you are using another HDMI input, the sound device cuts off and you get the output from the TV instead.
I got round this by buying an adapter which disables the pin responsible. Sky are apparently aware and are working on a fix. Time will tell…
HI, I have the exact same issue with my soundbar. Can you let me know what bit of kit you used.
Cheers
@Adrian I bought one of these and it’s solved the CEC problem: Lindy HDMI CEC Less Adaptor
Wait for all the ISP’s to start crying about us using ‘too much unlimited data’ ?
Not all Freeview channels are available. Talking Pictures TV is absent on Sky Go, Sky Glass and Sky Stream.
When I tried to upgrade my Sky Q to Sky Streaming today, they said I would lose all my discounts as they don’t offer any discounts on Sky Stream.
Because of this and the lack of all Freeview channels I’ve finally lost my patience with the greed of Sky and now given Sky 30 days notice of my cancellation. So please not to have to put up with their annual price increases and forcing you to watch adverts when it’s a subscription service.
Well that’s a drop dead fail IMO
Can have 4/5 streaming services for that price, I believe the problem is sports personally, idiots keep paying for it rather than play it.
I think Sky had a chance here to pull in some of the sports fans with a decent price for UHD. Instead you have to pay for the base pack which is about £29 rolling plus sports for £27. UHD is an extra £6 and then BT Sport is £27.
On Virgin stream you can get sky sports for £18 per month and BT sport for £10 per month both on rolling 30 days. BT sport is 4K non hdr and sky sports FHD.
Sky even have the cheek to charge for fast forwarding adverts after a year!
Think I will stick with Virgin. I would have been tempted for the UHD sports but not at them prices!
I get BT sports as part of my EE contract then pay £5 per month to get UHD and I watch it on my Android TV device using their app. Which I’ll admit, needs some work.
Have Sky Q and I pay a decent sum per month. I tried going with an alternative source but nothing else I have found compares to Sky, with regards to their box etc.
I watch a lot of the football and F1 so it’s worthwhile for me, but sometimes I squirm knowing how much they are taking from me each month.
Was hoping the new streaming box solution would be cheaper, surely it’s got to cheaper than paying for Satellites in orbit. Not really a smart move from them.
I really like my Virgin Stream, not all the channels, but certainly a good selection. I am a Virgin Broadband customer so I got the box for free with no setup, as others have said they’re currently offering Sky Sports for £18 for 18 months and BT Sports for a £10 for 18 Months which is much better value compared to Sky Stream, also having 10% netflix, disney+ etc is bonus.
To me a lot of the time Virgin miss the mark first time around, but with Virgin TV Stream I think it is a better proposition than Sky Stream, I think they understand which type of customer orders this type of device and have priced accordingly.
I hope Sky take note.
It still worries me that Sky are yet to address latency whilst watching live programming, particularly sport. They should at least highlight this on their ordering pages as most won’t know until they’re watching the game and their phone pings before they see a goal go in. This is why, for me personally at least, I hope they continue to offer a satellite option for the foreseeable.
It won’t even be something really solvable, maybe if they used multicast, but then it becomes a real headache to make it work on other ISPs.
Which is why I don’t see streaming live TV as the future and don’t understand how it’s moving this way. For me it’s actually step backwards going from live to ‘near live’.
The latency is around 30-45 seconds so far as I can tell. Not too terrible is it?
It’s not live though, and if you like to check Twitter, or chat with friends / family during the game (I do, it adds a social side to sport for me) and they are live you can find out something has happened before you see it.
Even if you ditch your phone there were reports during the World Cup of people hearing their neighbours celebrate 30 seconds before anything happened for them.
We’ve become so technologically advanced that we can get an F1 race from Australia to the UK in UHD with only a 7 second delay. That for me is amazing. To now just stuff 30-45 seconds on top is a huge backwards step.
I went for it as an early adopter and the prices were lower. I still had a sky Q contract until next May and wanted to pay less, so my monthly outlay went from £70 to £40.
Today’s launch increased the price for setup fees as I paid £59.99 for three pucks ( now £99.99 ). Also the whole home has gone up by £2 a month. UHD/Dolby Atmos up by £1 so I’m glad I took the plunge and made some savings.
I got screen refresh drops and skips by using ethernet once I unplugged the cable and got that puck on Wifi everything worked perfectly.
It’s a bit different from Sky Q and it took me a few days to come round with the playlist idea but once you understand how it works, it’s great. I seem to spend less time looking for something to watch now and the shopping channels are gone ( so I buy less stuff lol ).
I’ve had 3 pucks since early October, They work flawlessly. PQ is superb even linear channels. I would add however if I only had FTTC I wouldn’t have gone for Stream, can you imagine the bandwidth 3 pucks streaming UHD/HDR at the same time? I would have stuck with Q.
Begs the question, if you can get UK TV via your WiFi, via a conditional access system with a subscription why you can’t opt to not recieve BBC and not pay the TV tax. Yes, I’m well aware (painfully) that you can’t watch anything live at all without a license. But we all know it’s technically possible. I don’t watch live TV, because I don’t want to pay the TV tax. But when options exist to technically prevent me from watching and consuming BBC content to appease those that automatically assume because I don’t have a license I must be consuming their services without paying for it, why can they not just ask me if I want those channels and then I pay for the license.
why.
Everybody ‘claims’ not to watch the license content but they all do!!!
The TV detector van dowsing rods will be spinning like helicopter rotors outside your house!
Because they think we are getting something for nothing, the BBC think that no one, no one, don’t want their stuff. I get it from people I chat to when I say I don’t have a TV licence, oh you must be breaking the law then.
@TV license SWAT team
No such thing as TV detector vans, what are they going to detect? I am pretty sure they were empty vans when we had analogue TV, just park down the road to scare people. I don’t watch live TV, apart from the odd YouTube channel and since they content creators and not broadcast companies, no licence is needed. I certainly don’t use the BBC Iplayer, never used it even when it was legal to without a TV licence, but I know a few people who do, and they don’t have a Tv licence. How is anyone going to find out?
I do use BBc sounds now and again, once or twice a week.
Even streaming service that have live channels, I don’t watch the live channels.
Haha empty detector vans! Was only kidding about them doing a stake-out at your house btw!
Makes me laugh when people avoid an annual tv fee £150, when electricity has risen that per month and nobody seems to flinch or complain. Bizarre situation really.
Sky official products are getting much worse and more inflexible for customers both technically and on their billing systems as time goes on.
@TV license SWAT team, not much we can do about energy apart from trying to reduce the amount we use, but getting rid of the TV licence is one way to save money, not that i got rid of it for that reason, I have done away with the TV licence because I don’t watch live TV or use Iplayer.
Still waiting for the goons to come here, I keep getting their letters, they keep saying they will send someone over and yet, nothing. Such a shame, i am looking forward to closing the door in their face.
Can you still get Sky TV through a dish like the old days or is this kind of technology now “outdated”?
Yes you can. They send me offers to reconnect to Sky Q every other month.
This is a joke really. Sky Sky Entertainment & Netflix + Sky Sports + BT Sports + UHD = £84 and they even want to charge £20 for a “setup fee”! What setup Sky if I will do the setup myself?
It’s really an insult for a streaming service when I can get VM Media Ultimate Volt bundle with 1 GB internet, Sky Sports HD, BT Sports 4K, Sky Cinema 4K, Netflix Standard, telephone line with unlimited calls, O2 sim card with unlimited data, calls and texts, 5G, free international roaming all for £ 80. So VM is not only quad play but also cheaper than Sky Stream…
And when you re-contract they charge a £10 admin fee.
All these comments don’t seem to realise that the “set up fee” from Sky covers yes the set up on there systems but also that every customer owns the equipment that they’re setting up. I’d understand people getting annoyed at Sky to set up equipment which they don’t own (and yes I do know Sky charge for this with Sky Q equipment) but all Sky Stream and Glass equipment is owned by the consumer so I feel like these set up fees are to be expected.
There was a point in owning old sky boxes, you could use them as Freesat boxes. What’s the point owning this.
@Rai The problem is when you cancel the contract, Sky then deactivate the device and it becomes useless, you can’t even view any of the free BBC channels.
I guess Sky are worried that people may buy these cheaply from ebay or other sites and use them without paying any money to Sky.
Fair enough but then don’t call it “setup fee”, call it “Set top box”. And as pointed out the box is useless without Sky so not very green of them selling something that’s basically e-waste once you terminate the service…
@ WibbledOff
BBC channels are not free, you must pay the tv licence to view BBC channels and any live content on any channel.
£39.95 set-up fee, what is there to set up? All they do is send people a box, they certainly know how to part people with their money.
I think I will give it a miss, for a start I would have to have a TV licence.
If prices rise more and energy rises as much next year, as we are being told, then people will not be able to afford to have it.
I will stick to streaming, at least I can cancel when I want and no licence needed.
Whats the benefit of this over nowtv? Or will sky now be removing nowtv?
Now TV detracts from their new IPTV service via the puck so can’t see why they would keep Now TV long term as two branded systems to fund and the Now TV will return less revenue. It’s also been known for cheap as chips subscription offers from various deals. Customers will soon want features/changes on Now TV that they may have learned are available on the Sky Puck service so that causes customer service issues.
In time, the Sky puck service may offer a cheaper cut down tariff that does away with Now TV as a separate platform.
As the puck is owned by the customer I hope we won’t have a repeat of Sky sending out automatic updates that trash the box and then expect the customer to buy a new one. If its really the customers property the customer should have to approve any updates to their puck.
ah Virgin Stream – as long as you have Virgin Broadband it’s free to air channels with additional optional subscriptions cheaper than Sky and 30 day terms by default. So you can just have free to air channels without subscription. Channels like ITV2/3/4/Be/Dave are HD even though free. Also has catch up apps, britbox, Disney, Netflix, Prime, Sounds, UKTV apps.
Channels also encoded properly, and SD seems better quality than either Freeview or Virgin’s standard TV service via TIVO/360 box via coax. Fast channel changing and quick EPG/Guide. And if you create a user profile you can have BBC1 on channel 1 for example instead of 101 and completely and easily move channels around to your preference.
Looks like Virgin also thinking of removing the tie to Virgin Broadband as well, so in future may be any ISP.
I’ll stick with Virgin Stream as better value.
What can the device do outside of a contract?
if i sign up and leave after the 31 days, can i still watch freeview over it?
It turns into a paperweight.
Understand the idea but with current sky Q you can programme a recording download future episodes and new series reminders are these all still available
If only all sports watchers using Sky were to stop their subscription for sports the what would they do? I’m sure sure their was a whole country in the east, where Sky tried to increase the price of sports which amounted to a weeks pay, so all users cancelled and Sky backtracked and gave it to all for free.
Pure greed, nothing else. Charge £10 per month would severely reduce piracy etc I’d pay that, but no £29 basic rolling, then £27 for sports just greed.
All I really want is the sports, they force you to have the Entertainment package. I would pay a little more per month to have the football and F1, but they bundle it together on purpose. Wonder if they changed that they would indeed make more money in the end?
Since the official launch Sky have now removed the option to remove Sports & Movies via the app or website and now force you to phone them.
Typical Sky greed