Sky UK Temporarily Phasing Out Sky Q Triple Play TV Packages UPDATE
Sky (Sky Broadband) has confirmed that they will, from today, be temporarily “phasing out” their old satellite-based Sky Q Triple Play packages, which means they’re “no longer available for purchase on Sky.com“. Existing customers will continue to be supported. Sky’s focus is on their newest internet-based streaming products.
The move comes in the context of Sky’s pivot to launch Sky Glass (Sky integrated streaming TV set) and Sky Stream (streaming set-top-box) a few short years ago, which are standalone products that use your home broadband ISP and WiFi connection to stream Sky’s on-demand video content and live TV channels (i.e. without any need for a tedious satellite dish).
As for Sky Q-Lite, Sky seems to be indicating that they’ve now stopped communicating related products as part of their offer updates, although they don’t specifically say that it’s no longer available like their Sky Q Triple Play (TV, broadband and phone) packages. But it’s probably only a matter of time until that changes.
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None of this should come as much of a surprise, as this has clearly been Sky’s direction of travel for some time. However, it’s worth noting that Sky Glass and Sky Stream aren’t yet perfect and there have been some complaints about their shortcomings vs Sky Q, although Sky have been working hard over the past few years to improve the new platforms and tackle such gripes.
UPDATE 5th Sept 2024
Sky has clarified to ISPreview that the information they sent out didn’t give the full context. The provider states that their Sky Q Triple Play sales journey will only become temporarily unavailable on Sky.com later this month, rather than permanently. Customers can also continue to purchase Sky Q Triple Play via their call centres and in Sky Stores, and can still purchase Sky Q and Broadband individually in all digital channels.
This relates to a migration of some of their digital sales platforms, although they plan to re-add Sky Q Triple Play on Sky.com sometime in the New Year. All of this is rather different from the “phasing out” language used in the original notice, which made no mention of it being temporary.
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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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Sky’s contract with Astra currently runs out in 2030 which is also when the FTTP build is largely expected to be complete. I would imagine that’s when they will hope to switch off satellite altogether.
I could be wrong but I believe that Sky’s contract with Astra run’s out in 2028? I think it’s just UKTV and a few others that have longer contracts.
Considering that all the Sat’s at 28.8 have a 15 year service life, and newest one was launched in 2014 – the current end of life for the newest sat in that slot is 2029.
Astra are still launching satellites for their other position at 19.2 degrees, they have 1 new one launched a few months ago, and another launching soon – however no plans at all for 28.8 degrees where our sky dishes point.
I highly doubt it, they would lose millions of customers over night if they did that i dsay another extention or 2 after 2030
@Andrew
Sky extended their current deal for another 2 years to 2030 about a year ago.
Ah i wasn’t aware of that – be interesting to see if Astra work on the basis that the satellites last longer than their service life to provide the service, or if a new satellite will go up.
There’ll be room to flex depending on remaining fuel and analysis of satellite performance. Several of the Astra 28.2 satellites went beyond their expected lifespan, either at that position or elsewhere. A year would likely be straightforward, especially if the expectation is that the number of satellite channels will dwindle and leave spare capacity.
19.2 can probably justify new satellites as there’s a lot of different customers and expected long term demand. at 28.2 it’s mostly Sky/Freesat and (separately) some African users
There is too much reliance on a homes broadband connection, even established and brand new estates have total loss of connectivity from time to time (see Mondays OFNL outage)
factor in non-technical users working with there own routers, wifi, mesh kit…..
putting all your eggs in one basket seems a risk, even if Sky are blinkered into only seeing their product.
How many households even have a DAB radio, let alone FM? shifting to smart speakers etc
with freeview also moving to an internet first model, people could be forced to reverting back to reading books during an outage! (I can just imagine the social media rants!)
this is an entertainment service, not an emergency broadcast system. Sky have no requirement to ensure that their product works under all conditions, unlike Freeview and broadcast radio.
OFNL is arguably an outlier, most homes are not connected to a monopoly operator with poor resilience.
I understand where you are coming from and I kind of agree, not that TV is the most important thing to be honest, stick a DVD in or read a book if it goes belly up. The satellites must be getting on now, and I presume are not far off the end of their operating life, it is not as easy as replacing terrestrial broadcast equipment and certainly a lot more expensive.
i do agree about all the eggs if one basket. Someone on facebook have been having problems with their FTTP for over a week, they found out yesterday it was a radar that was causing it to muck up, moved the router and all is well now, but that was wired as well as Wi-fi.
Strange really as I did not even think we had any radar here aprt from the SAS camp and that is not close to where they live. But it shows that even FTTP can have problems and if you put all your eggs in one basket as you say, then you are stumped for things that are more important than TV.
Do this online, do that online, have an App for this, get App for that.
the other thing is that there are still many households that can’t get decent broadband and may not for years, certainly if they live in the sticks.
As for DAB radio, most new radios have DAB, just a shame DAB is rubbish, I prefer using FM myself if the station is available on FM, but these days I listen to Boom Radio a lot and I use my Echo devices for that as it is better than the DAB on my radio.
Switching everything to be delivered through the internet seems to be the direction of travel. This is one of the drivers of the FTTP roll out. In 3 years on FTTP so far I’ve had only 1 1/2 hour daytime outage and only 3 during the night (presumably due to planned maintenance), I only know about them because my EE mobile backup unit kicked in and logged the event. You already have one single point of failure – the power supply. Sooner or later it is likely that Freeview will also be shut down and the spectrum given over to mobile.
I do get the concern about if your Internet goes down you’ll loose everything. However if this affects you you can get a 4G back. Vodafone, EE and Virgin Media do offer it as a service.
To be fair, they had all their eggs in one basket previously with Satellite. A period of heavy rain or a misaligned dish and all channels disappear.
There are many houses in the UK that cannot have a dish due to line of sight issues or restrictions with landlords. Also, a number of older installations in blocks of flats don’t support Sky Q.
At least now there’s a choice, those with satellite restrictions can now get service over broadband.
Are sky aware of the potential customers they’ll loose? not all homes even in urban areas can get the minimum 25Mbps?
My parent live in a 1980’s estate within Norwich city councils boundaries, less than 2 miles from the city centre, and the best anyone in the 100+ houses can get on FTTC is 17Mbps, their estate isn’t listed on the OR fibre build schedule, and CityFibre dug up some roads, and gave up and left 2 years ago without service being delivered to anyone.
Their only alternative is VM, and who’s going to get Sky Glass/Stream when they subscribe to VM?
as one of the UK’s major ISPs, yes I think they probably do have an idea of what’s available and how this will only continue to improve.
At some point the number of remaining satellite customers will reach a point where it is no longer worthwhile to maintain the service. Many of them will of course be able to get, or already have fibre.
Also worth pointing out that Q is quite old now and long overdue for a refresh. There’s evidently no business appetite for another satellite receiver.
They are not phasing out the satellite based TV service just the triple play bundle (TV + broadband + phone). I’m sure they would like to move over to streaming only but it will be many years before that is commercially viable for them.
With Sky Q Triple Play no longer being listed on their website, there’s no reason to say satellite based Sky wont be available at all. What i’d expect is that if one was to call and if a few checks (such as internet availability and speed) mean Stream/Glass aren’t feasible, then Q could still be on offer…
It is expected that 99% of houses will be covered by FTTP by 2030, the year Sky’s contract runs out. Your parents will be pretty unlucky not to have it by then.
Is this changeover/announcement still in progress?
I am surprised Sky have done this so early. Many of us still have satellite dishes attached to our homes and are hence still potential customers particularly is still on DSL.
Currently Sky.com has Sky Glass under both the TV and Glass tabs. The streaming Puck is still there buried on their web site but not navigable from the front page (logged in or not). Surely they are not going for the Sky Glass only.
I got rid of my Dish last year, been up for over 20 years not being used, so I took it down and the scrap man had it. It was never going to be used again as the chance of me having Sky again is zero, and I don’t see myself having Freesat as I don’t even have a TV licence and I can’t see myself having one again.
so at least the dish have gone to be made into something else. 🙂
I’m intrigued as how this is going to work for live sports, IP based content delivery is at least a minute behind traditional delivery methods (often much more when comparing Sky Go to what I’m seeing on TV!). Getting a FotMob notification a minute before seeing a goal is not going to work – yes I can turn them off, but you can’t really tell everyone in the pub to do the same!
Sky are already minimising the delay, it’s gone from up to 90 seconds to around 22 seconds with the release of Entertainment OS 1.3. They are still rolling it out to the channels though, believe it’s just Main Event that uses the new system at the moment
Yep and other live streamers are already well below that. In low latency mode Twitch has latency under 2 seconds and otherwise it’s still under 6 seconds. So there’s no reason Sky cannot get to those kind of latencies.
Sky have been running low latency test channels since January 2024 and are now available on Sky Sports Main event. The delay used to be around 25 seconds on football and it’s now down to around 10 secs, comparable with Q. They intend to roll out low latency to more sports and live channels in the future, FotMob app is now behind Sky Sports Main Event for goal alerts.
But internet is just not good enough yet. They need to hurry up rolling out FTTP
gigabit is nearly 85% coverage ( includes virgin ) and openreach fttp is around 45% and adding around 1million per quarter. so pretty quick already
@Graham,, says who? Still plenty of streets in my city that don’t have Fibre, not that you need fibre or 1Gb/s for sky, but I bet they will try to make out to people that you do to up sell them 1Gb/s fibre. You still need a pretty decent broadband connection.
Still a lot of people that don’t have decent broadband and will not for years, I know of people who live in the sticks and some even with FTTC if they have it are lucky to get 20Mb/s, One get 10 due to a problem with the copper cable going to their house and it seems nothing will be done about it. Their provider don’t seem to be able to get anything out of Openreach. Myself, I would take it further.
says Ofcom. Anecdotes are lovely but not as good as actual data.
According to their statistics, 97% of premises can get 30+Mbps, 80% can get gigabit (ie including Virgin), 62% can get FTTP (almost all will be gigabit+). The number of premises that cannot get at least 10Mbps is a mere 57000. That’s today, not in the 2030s when satellite TV will likely cease.
“I bet they will try to make out to people that you do to up sell them 1Gb/s fibre.” – you’d lose that bet, their cheapest Stream + broadband bundle is 100Mbps.
And of course you have to remember that Sky is not obligated to sell a TV service to anyone. If they don’t want new satellite customers, that’s their decision.
@ad47 plenty of articles on here and other sites that track builds etc. virgin counts as gigabit ( not as fttp ) . think fttp is around 65% ( with alt nets+openreach etc ) . where i am and a few excahnges nearby no full fibre only virgin
Given that there 31-32 million properties in this country, Openreach should be hitting 16 million in this quarter so they will be passed the halfway mark.
@bigdave yes i would of thought so too. my exchange is a good year away from the full fibre openreach build, at least its on the list to be done!
Ofcom and Think Broadband https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/ for a start but what do they know?
You’ve been on Think Broadband for over 20 years and posted on its forum over 18,000 times. Maybe read the articles in between writing massive posts full of nothing – they do a monthly post on gigabit and full fibre coverage, most recent https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/10214-uk-broadband-report-july-2024
@Ivor, we will see, Openreach only got off their backside here because of competition, I doubt we would have FTTRP here if Zzoomm did not come here. Even so, there are still lots of parts that Openreach have not covered and some of them are in the big estates.
Data can be made up and is made very often, as i have been told a few times, don’t believe everything you hear.
the other thing is, just because FTTP is available, don’t mean everyone will want it.
Genuinely straight over head. It’s impressive.
Sky cannot leave it alone tĥy keep moving I just upgraded to sky Q it great what a shame
Just done a sky stream quote, its over £60 more for me to switch from sky Q, as like for like as possible..
and existing customers don’t get offered the same prices which are still £30 more than I pay now.
What exactly is “Sky Q Lite”?
I believe it’s for people in flats or properties with only one dish feed.
Sky Q with free to air channels so you can record them
Sky needs to bring to the market a stream box with a recorder like Sky Q so you can record several programmes and keep.
Several friends has Sky Stream and noticed stored programmes on the Sky Stream have been removed.
This is why a stream recorder is needed.
Would that be Sky Q…. Whole point of streaming is exactly that….
Sky provides catch-up to their content and other on-demand services.
Streamers with recording is not a technical issue but a commercial one. They and their content providers simply don’t want it as recordings can be kept indefinitely, cloned etc including if it is used simply to skip advertising.
The only way is to build your own based on a mini PC.
I think it’s intentional on Sky’s part — much easier to keep the rights holders happy if you can e.g. prevent customers from recording shows, or prevent them from keeping recordings beyond a certain timeframe.
A reply to James , no the streaming playlist is no where near as reliable and convenient as hard drive recordings , i had sky glass n had to go back to sky q cz when i added to play list the amount of times i tried playing a saved program it would display “sorry this program is unavailable / error. Was ridiculous
I agree. But it’s cheaper and easier for Sky to do away with the recording functionality as there’s less to go wrong (no moving parts) if you take away the HDD. Also, Sky sell a skip ads “feature” which allows users to pay for the right to fast forward through ads, a nice little revenue earner. They could, in theory, bring this to Sky Q and stop us fast forwarding ads on recorded content as I know that’s what they do in the US on their operators such as AT&T and the like.
I personally love Sky Q as having things locally, and delivered via my dish gives me resiliency because the chances of both my Internet and Sky TV going down at the same time are slim whereas with Sky Stram, Glass, or any of the streaming services, losing your Internet will take out your TV, too.
There’s also the issue of bandwidth. My current bandwidth here is only 32 Mbps which means that trying to stream anything on more than one TV or stream whilst downloading a file, can be patchy.
I guess Sky will have done the maths and decided it’s more financially viable to shed customers who cannot switch over than it is to keep paying for the Astra services.
Glad I left them for good last year. I just moved over to Now TV, month long contracts, and when my offer expires I just go to the website and go through cancellation till it offers me a new deal. Never need to speak to a human trying to upsell you constantly. That works better when you have multiple subscription services IMO.
Ditto. I’m only interested in the sports so just got that. Go to cancel and there’s usually a decent offer to stay, even better now UHD is available
I’m not sure I’d describe that as leaving them for good given Now is owned and operated by… Sky!
You do realise that Now is operated by Sky Group and both are owned by the same company (Comcast)…
“Sky have been working hard over the past few years to improve the new platforms and tackle such gripes.”
It really doesn’t feel like it, just to start:
Playlist keeps breaking, and is incomplete.
Ad Skipping is a joke, its an awkward fast forward at best (where the skipping?)
@Mark.I don’t know what your problem is with ad skipping, it works well on all Sky catch-up channels.
I think that the real problem will be contention all over the internet, if all your neighbors far and wide are trying to use their b/b the system will not cope. Sky Q has been and is a good system with streaming, multi room and recording with apps available to use as required. Streaming from what I can see is a con job to extract more money of you, ie itvx, what a load of rubbish. BBC iPlayer, why are the BBC pushing this as hard as they are ? Its all about profit nothing more.
Contention? Nah, everyone sharing would have to hit the fastest speed 100% of the time, and that is not going to happen with streaming, many people will not even go to the fastest FTTP speed.
If there is contention then it will be a problem with the ISP, not the network, and to be honest I have not seen contention for years. Even on a 36Mb/s FTTC connection i could stream 4K on three different devices, only did it for a test, but it worked fine.
It is always about money, ITVX like other streaming services want you to pay for the service to get extra content or no adverts.
Not sure what BBC game is, makes no difference to them if people use Iplayer or not as they don’t get extra money.
At some all TV will be online, I don’t think it will happen as quick as what some people think it will. Freeview will be around for many years, even more if Freely is only going to be available on New TV sets and not even all of them.
As I have said before, makes no odds to me, I stream most of my video media, I don’t have a TV licence so I can’t watch live TV, the only stuff I don’t stream is DVBD/Blue-rays. I can’t see that changing to be honest, I have no interest in giving the BBC any money
> Not sure what BBC game is, makes no difference to them if people use Iplayer or not as they don’t get extra money.
I imagine the cost of broadcasting on Freeview isn’t cheap. If they can make the case that they should be allowed to move more content online-only, that will save a significant amount of money.
I’ve Been With Astra Satellite Since 1st May 1990 Starting 19.2 East & Sky Digital From November 1998 At 28.2 East Starting With Sky Digital Box Than Sky Plus From 2005 Sky HD In Summer 2016 Until Joyed Sky Q On 09th September 2022 Still Customer I’ll Still With Astra Satellite Service Great Job Over The Year’s With SES
Possibly sky are looking at using LEO satellites for Stream IP delivery into Fibre not-spots? A deal with starlink is probably going to be cheaper than a new Astra satellite? Plus they have the dish installers….
I don’t see this as viable – sky pay x to connect their servers to the internet, and then the customers pay for the data connection.
In this scenario sky would be paying both ends – and starlink is not cheap.
I think sky will just go IP only, and how you deliver that IP connectivity is up to you – Fibre, Copper, 4g, 5g, LEO Satellite etc.
Hi to whom this concerns what is going to happen to free to air satellite ie multisatellite with a motorised dish channels
Eventually channels will begin getting removed from FTA where its not commercially viable to have them broadcasting from satellite.
As you pick up channels from multiple positions, this should take longer to impact you as there will still be something else to watch on another spot.
But I feel this type of setup is being increasingly consigned to the history books, only kept about by people who’ve had this for a while or have an interest in satellites.
Certainly nobody I know under about 50 has any interest in it.
I had sky stream for less than 24 hrs before going back to q, it is junk , the device was very laggy, crashed a couple of times and the ad skipping service never worked properly it was like an old terrible eBay box
4k Watch from the start. Hold your breath… Fast forward the adverts CRASH ! Now when the programme goes to breaks although Ad-Free it pauses. Hold your breath…Phew it carries on..or CRASHES ..
Sky glass needs a minimum of 25mgb to work,but if you live in a rural area, like me ,and the maximum speed available is 37mgb then you will struggle
Add in an Alexa or mobile phone or other things that use the Internet and you will lose signal to the TV, and it begins to freeze or go off completely meaning it has to be re booted every half hour or so.
MINIMUM BROADBSND SPEED NEEDS TO BE 60MGB AT LEAST FOR IT TO WORK EFFECTIVELY!!
> MINIMUM BROADBSND SPEED NEEDS TO BE 60MGB
Given the top speed of an MGB is around 120 MPH, are you saying you need at least 7,200 MPH of speed? That’s about mach 9 🙂
This is just the start of removal of satellite packages and it will not stop the direction is clear. To those who aren’t ever going to get decent broadband Sky are and will dump you when the Sats are out of service this is obvious. The cost of lofting new satellites and buying capacity for a few percent of the population does not justify the cost. Potentially they may tie up with Elon to cover these areas with IP or leave you on your own to sign a deal with Elon. They don’t have a universal service requirement and never will.
I’m planning to ‘phase out’ Sky altogether when my contract comes up soon. Even if I wasn’t, the one thing I wouldn’t do is swap to the streaming thing, it’s so inferior to the Satellite delivery setup & I have *extremely* good internet.
Sky have made 1200 installers redundant since August 2022, only 1800 remain.
That alone should tell you the direction of the business.
People would move to Virgin media who offer a box that records several programmes to a hard drive similar to Sky Q but through the Internet.
Sky needs to offer a similar concept
Virgin Media do not provide this service as you state.
You can get their V6/360 box which has a HDD and offers recording features, but this is not delivered over the internet but over their HFC network. Unplug your VM hub and the V6/360 box will continue to work (albeit with warnings and certain content unavailable)
Or you can get their Stream box which does work exclusively over IP, but does not have any recording facilities.
The Sky stream service is not fit for purpose, Dolby Atmos sound glitches all,over the placer, pixelation on all sport channels and others but predominantly sky’s own channels and cheap, low quality and questionable build quality pucks
It will no doubt become a decent enough product but right now it’s not robust enough and the bugs and glitches ruin the viewing experience