Broadband Streaming Service NOW TV UK Finally Gets a Revamp
Sky’s sibling NOW TV video streaming platform appears to have now largely completed the deployment of its new app and User Interface (UI), adding a “new look and some great new features“. The roll-out of the new app started on 18th February 2025 and has taken “several weeks” to deliver, although some devices have yet to benefit.
“We’ll be rolling out the updates on the NOW app over several weeks. During this time, you may notice the old and new versions running side by side on different devices. It also means that the new features won’t be available on all supported devices straight away. Not sure if your device is supported? Take a look at our supported devices or keep checking your app store for updates,” said NOW TV’s update.
The UI changes largely mean that customers will be able to set up individual profiles, can do more to personalise their NOW viewing experience and will find it easier to get straight to the content they want with top 10 recommendations and enhanced search.
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Summary of New Features
Profiles
Personalise your NOW viewing experience with individual profiles. You’ll be able to keep track of what you’re watching, plus you’ll get your own Entertainment and Cinema recommendations based on your favourite title choices and watch history.
Each profile can have its own:
Avatar
Name
Maturity ratings
Profile PIN
Autoplay settingsYou can create up to 6 profiles for individual members of your household in one account, including adult and kids profiles.
Profile PIN
Restrict others from accessing your NOW profile with a 4-digit PIN lock. And if you’ve got kids in the house, you can also use a profile PIN to stop younger viewers from watching content in an adult profile.
Parental controls
NOW’s new parental controls will allow you to restrict what each profile sees. As well as the profile PIN feature above, you’ll be able to set a profile-based maturity rating to prevent kids from watching anything they shouldn’t.
Personalised Entertainment and Cinema recommendations
Jump in and start watching entertainment that’s tailored for you. You’ll be able to personalise your profile’s homepage and enhance your Entertainment and Cinema recommendations. Just choose your top 5 favourite titles when you create a new profile, and we’ll suggest TV shows and movies we think you’ll like.
Top 10 rail
Easily discover the top trending content on NOW. Our new top 10 rail will highlight the most popular TV shows and movies ranked by number of streams, plus new releases from the last 90 days.
Enhanced search
We’ve made it easier than ever to find the shows, movies and sports you love on NOW. Our enhanced search feature will allow you to search by genre, actor, title, name, sport, and more. Don’t know what to watch? You’ll also be able to browse the popular searches section for the shows, movies and sports that everyone is watching.
As usual with a major app change, some devices have yet to benefit from the new software and there have been a few bugs to contend with too (these should be ironed out soon). One other negative is that customers can no longer rewind the previous 2 hours of broadcast content (credits Cord Busters for spotting that).
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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This is a skin of the peacock app and it has a bug that breaks HDR with Apple TV (which hasn’t been fixed for years). It’s not great at all.
It’s broken on AppleTV.
The recent update has affected the ‘Match Dynamic Range’ feature, causing HDR content to play in SDR. If the AppleTV box is set to 4K SDR, some live UHD Channels won’t play either.
Its broken on Apple TV, Roku and a few other platforms too!
Apple TV isn’t getting the HDR if you don’t force the device to output in HDR all the time, which makes a mockery of Match Dynamic Range settings.
On Roku, its not hitting the Match Framerate unless you first go to a Sky Sports channel with Boost or Ultra Boost to force the app into 50Hz mode, otherwise its forcing everything from the live-channels into a 60Hz wrapper – 25p into 60Hz looks woeful!!
Occasionally the Roku will also not match framerate for OnDemand content.
All of these bugs are present on the SkyShowtime app thats in Europe also, aswell as the Peacock app in the US. They know about them yet still pushed this mess upon everyone!!
How they took a functioning application build, made in the UK, sacked the UK dev team and took it on in the US and mangled it like this, yet believe it works despite the beta-testing and ignored every one of the warnings – comical!
Same old bugs with added annoyances! Autoplay trailers and live channels. Programme guide disappears before you can even read the description. I genuinely don’t know what goes on in the minds of UX designers these days, if anything. The YouTube app’s latest innovation is to list your subscriptions in a random order so you can’t find anything… (Apple TV.)
The help page still says that Chromebooks are not supported. There was a hope that the new platform was created by a team of professionals. Hopefully the page was just not updated.
App on the Amazon Firestick is feeding through 2.0 audio, even when program details on UHD sports shows audio as 5.1
🙁
Sky must seriously be laughing their heads off at being able to charge people for HD content still
It’s a massive part of why I choose to sail the high seas instead of giving companies extra for HD content
It’s 2025, HD content should be the absolute standard these days
They are still doing that then, but then so is Sky TV.
I still get the emails from Now and I have not used now for, must be 9 years or so
Annoyingly you can no longer view the catalogue without having an active membership. It was quite handy being able to browse through what’s recently been added to see if it was worth subscribing for a few months.
That is a problem with a lot of the streaming services, it would be nice to see what I would be paying for.
These comments are most enlightening for me as I was puzzled for days as to why I no longer get UHD on Roku and Apple TV devices but do on Firestick and the Samsung TV app.
Guide is horrendous too small text and channel logos. A cancellation is coming up..
All your comments have reinforced my view that’s it’s a service not to be bothered with, the developer’s should be able to deliver a modern system without all these glaring failures, on the other hand these reported problems could be a result of the CDN not playing well with the new user interface, and in fairness to the app development team, that’s a problem they have no control over.
The only way to make these companies realise is complain using their official procedure not just the call centre staff, then #defund them by cancelling the service if no offer of fixing is offered. This is not a small company starting out, so has the resources. If you don’t, you’ll just get call centre staff scripted platitudes and nothing more.
Absolutely abysmal, going into NOW TV is like going into a maze with no exit. It’s so hard to find what you’re trying to look for so please put it back.
I’ve noticed I can now view 4k content on my TCL tv too, which wasn’t the case before.
The update has effectively stopped it working on my Firestick 4k. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’ll play an ad pre programme then just go back to the programme page and refuses to play anything. Only way I have managed to fix that is to restart the firestick and try again.
The live TV channel guide is now completely useless as other’s have said.
Had to spend half an hour on a chatbot on Sunday afternoon to even get it to acknowledge I had an account before I could get into it immediately post “upgrade”.
I’ve lost the apps that were on my Now box after the upgrade today. Where are channel 4, BBC etc?
Since the update lost all my freeview channels on my now tv box now customer service not even bothered to get back to me after a formal complaint?
What an amazing update – all 5.1 now plays in stereo. Cool retro feature. Maybe with the next update all content can be in black & white like the ‘good’ old days. Hoping for everything to be in SD first though – sick of all this HD, 4K crap.
Having purchased now through the streaming app on my Amazon fire stick it works like a dream and am very pleased with it.Most people seem to have trouble with the small set top box which they have now discontinued so I would recommend the app only.