Sky UK’s NOW TV introduces new membership options for Sky Sports
Sky has today announced that their sibling NOW (NOW TV) video streaming platform and broadband service has introduced a new membership structure for customers seeking to add Sky Sports content – adding two new Sky Sports plans. Fans can also continue to get the full line-up via NOW’s existing All Sky Sports plan if they want (from £27.99 a month).
In terms of the two new plan options for Sky Sports content. The new Multi-Sport Membership, starting at £19.99 a month, brings together a range of Sky Sports coverage excluding football. The membership includes live coverage of every Formula 1 race weekend, golf majors, men’s and women’s international cricket, year-round tennis, darts, rugby, NFL and more.
The second option comes in the form of a new Football Membership, starting at £23.99 a month, which offers access to Sky Sports’ football coverage (i.e. more than 1,500 live matches this season across the Premier League, WSL, EFL, SPFL and more).
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Carli Kerr, MD of Sky TV & NOW, said:
“Every sports fan has the moments they can’t wait for, whether it’s kick-off, the first ball of a Test match or a match-winning double in the darts.
With our new memberships, fans have more choice over the sport they pay for. Football fans can choose Football, and fans of F1, cricket, golf and more can pick Multi-Sport. And those who want everything can still get All Sky Sports. It’s a simpler, more flexible way to get the sport you love on NOW.”
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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HD video at a paltry 12Mbps being a £6 extra in the year 2026 is a very typical Sky cash-grab, and sours what is otherwise a not too bad looking offer.
There’s usually an introductory offer, then if you go through the steps to cancel before it ends they offer a better price. Managed to get 4k for £4 but we’re also offering hd for £2
If only it was streamed at 12mb/s. HD video (1080p) live-streamed on Now is CBR at 7.8mb/s
720p video is streamed at 4.6mb/s CBR and UHD (2160p) is streamed at 15mb/s CBR.
Or here is a thought just let us pick 1 sport channel, eg F1 some of us don’t care about other sports
Exactly. So if you want F1 with Sky/Now, you have to pay a minimum of £20 a month. If you want it in UHD, that goes up to £29 a month! Which takes it up to an eye-watering £348 a year.
F1 TV can be had for WAY less in available markets. Even in the most expensive region, Denmark, you only pay around £150 a year for UHD coverage (F1 TV Premium) with all the bells and whistles (Multiview and so on).
And if you are in the US and have an Apple TV subscription, all of this is included for free.
We get this stinking pile of expensive garbage that is Sky.
And that is why I watch F1 some other way, it may not be live, but it is available 2 hours or so after the race.
If they made F1 available for a decent price I would go for it, but if they can’t be bothered to do that, then so be it.
I did watch the last two live, but not at home.
Exactly. I actively refuse to pay for Sky Sports as I’m only interested in F1. If I could get F1TV through Sky at a fair price, I would. But currently they get £0 and like @Ad47uk get it through other means. Sky’s coverage is pants too. Coulthard > Brundle these days but someone like me doesn’t even need commentary.
At least F1 people don’t have to pay for football now.
Absolutely agree. F1 gave Sky the rights so you cannot buy the F1 TV service in the UK as mentioned by others. I like F1 and Formula E (last season on ITV Streaming so essentially free). I am waiting for Formula E rights to be sold off to a subscription based service as it gains more traction which will no doubt cause it to end up in another expensive bundle. What annoys me is all these paid TV services bundle their offerings so as to maximise the take providing a whole pile of channels/streams that are really not wanted and Sky is one of the worst for adverts – you pay to receive adverts or pay extra to remove some on non live services so sport always includes lots of adverts. Even these changes simply takes out football but saves very little whilst the football only offering saves a pittance. Sky is a rip off pure and simple. I really don’t get why people are so willing to be fleeced.
They should roll this out to Sky Q/Stream as well tbh. I pay for Sky Sports Complete but i only care about the F1 and partially the US Open tennis and the darts at Christmas. The only reason i upgraded from a legacy F1-only access pass to Complete is due to the fact it would only cost me £2 more for Complete. I dont really want to pay for football and would love to see Sky offer a version of Sky Sports which doesn’t include it.
Interesting. I wonder how that will work with Sky Sports Main Event which shows all different sports. Also Sky Sports F1 is sometimes commandeered for football if they run out of UHD channels for Premier League. Are they planning a new channel line-up or will they just temporarily lock out the channels if the wrong sport is being broadcast?
Also I’ve never paid more than £19.99 for the full package as new offers at £17.99 or £19.99 for 6-months pop-up every time the old offer ends (after clicking through the cancellation screens)! I wonder if this will change that. Perhaps the real obtainable price for the non-football package could be as low as £9.99 which would be an absolute bargain.
To answer my own question Main Event is only available on the All Sports package along with UHD1 and UHD2. So this does mean there are no UHD channels available for the Football package even if you have Ultra Boost. Also you’ll only really get darts and F1 in UHD with the multi-sport package. UHD cricket and so on normally on Main Event or UHDX won’t be available. So it’s quite a downgrade for Ultra Boost.
That changes the calculus on pricing a fair bit for me!
https://skygroup.sky/en-gb/article/now-gives-sports-fans-more-choice-with-new-sky-sports-memberships
Just stick everything on pay-per-view and have done with it. Even with these packages you’re still being forced into buying sports/competitions/teams you don’t care about just to get access to the ones you do.
I’m not holding my breath, but I wonder (hope!) if this move from NOW/SkySports will at some point provoke a move by TNTsports to also separate their football(/rugby) and non-football offerings to sensible price points to compete.
Maybe call the non-football TNT offering something like “Eurosport”.
Oh wait, that’s what they used to do before TNT (Warner Brothers) got greedy by bumping the price of Eurosport up four-fold by lumping cycling/ski/etc in with unwanted football.
This move from NOW is making TNT look even more uncompetitive than it already was.
I hate Sky Sports and have no interest in watching sports. I have Sky Ultimate and Sky Cinema
This is still way too expensive and not good enough. They need to operate the sports further, stop bundling everything together. Sell F1 for £8 a month for instance or something like that.
I’d love a Lamborghini, it’s way too expensive, tried to get the dealership to reduce it to a price I thought was fair…………..no chance, guess I’ll have to do without.
Do you work for Sky? It is hilarious to see you simping for a multi billion dollar corporation. And it is sweet how you think comparing a Lamborghini luxury VERY expensive car, the majority of people cannot afford, is in the same league as a TV streaming service. Have you not got any other argument?
How about a 9mth contract for F1.
I would say that everyone replying to this thread should be very careful what they wish for. Indeed Sky overpays for sports content because they can bundle it and overcharge for that. And indeed it’s likely that if the content owner were to cut off Sky or the other middle men they could get a lot more people to subscribe directly and a more “affordable” price. The difficulty is that they will need to cannibalise their existing business while they build up the new one. And that’s hard to do when you are hooked into the money drug. But I have no doubt that it will eventually happen with most sports.
However everyone wanting their favourite sport in a separate subscription be warned. Once they hook you into their direct subscription they will start to rack up prices and you will most likely end up paying the same you were paying to Sky but for a single sport! Remember how cheap Netflix and Disney once were?
At the end of the day these bundling and unbundling moves are there to extract the maximum revenue possible. Not to benefit the customer. And they continue to happen Ad Infinitum…