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Sky Stream box review: It’s the most hassle-free way of getting Sky TV, with a few quirks
The plug and play device works on any telly in the home, but the new recording feature isn’t for everyone
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Your support makes all the difference.Cables snaking their way throughout the home. Ugly, grey, bowl-shaped dishes on the roof. Engineer visits taking time out of your day. For more than 30 years, installing Sky TV in the home has remained an inconvenient chore, and a massive eyesore to boot.
But when the company launched the Sky Glass TV in 2021 – the first TV Sky has ever made and the first Sky TV device that didn’t require a satellite dish – we began to wonder whether those days were numbered.
With the launch of the Sky Stream box in late 2022, we’re inching ever closer to that satellite dish-free future. Initially a secondary device that connected to the Sky Glass TV, letting customers watch Sky on other TVs in the home, the Sky Stream puck has been re-branded as just the Sky Stream, sans-puck, and works independent of the Sky Glass TV, with all the same features.
It works exactly like a streaming box – a slightly less-powerful one compared to the Fire Stick and Apple TV 4K, but a streaming box all the same. The benefit is that the Sky Stream box can stream live TV from Sky – something you can’t do on the Apple TV or Amazon Fire Stick.
The Sky Stream supports 4K playback and UHD, HDR, Dolby Atmos, a host of streaming apps and on-demand content. So, with the promise of a fuss-free satellite TV setup, should you go climbing up the roof to tear down your satellite dish this very second? We put the Sky Stream box to the test to find out.
Read more:
How we tested
We’ve been using the Sky Stream box for over a month now, getting to grips with the user interface, watching live content, on-demand content, as well as “recorded” content via the playlist feature. We’ve put the Dolby Atmos content through its paces, checked out the streaming service offerings, and analysed the pricing structure to see how worthwhile it is.
We’ve also compared it to both the Sky Glass TV and the more traditional Sky Q box. While there are some small differences between the experience you get when watching content on the Sky Stream versus the Sky Glass, there are more significant differences between it and Sky Q that might influence your decision on whether you want it in your home.
Sky Stream review
Sky Stream: From £26 per month, Sky.com
Rating: 4.5/5
- Dimensions: 10.8cm x 10.8cm x 1.8cm
- Weight: 0.1kg
- Formats supported: 4K HDR, Dolby Atmos
- Pros: Tiny, featherlight device; don’t need to switch out your TV; slick and simple user interface; constantly updated; cheap Sky Sports plans and pricing
- Cons: Slightly sluggish; obnoxious add-ons really do add up; playlist doesn’t offer real recording functionality
Imagine if you could chuck everything great about the Sky Glass TV – from the quick and simple user interface to the no-fuss setup – into a teensy-tiny box and not have to get rid of your current mini-LED TV that you spent an extortionate amount on. That’s the Sky Stream in a nutshell: Sky Glass TV – but in a box.
Sky Glass TV owners will be extremely familiar with Sky Stream, and that’s because it looks exactly like the multiroom Sky Stream puck. You know, that little square box you’ve been hooking up to the other TVs in your home to get Sky TV for the past couple of years?
Well, there’s a reason the two things look so similar, and that’s because the Sky Stream box is literally the exact same puck device, but it’s now its own thing. It’s an independent person with its own thoughts and feelings that don’t require the Sky Glass’s centralised mind to work.
Sky Stream design and set up
The Sky Stream looks like the Apple TV box, featuring a rounded square design, but it’s half the size in terms of depth and weight, coming in at just 0.1kg. It’s so small and thin that you can just slot it invisibly into your TV unit or behind the TV itself.
For those who aren’t the most technically savvy, Sky makes it super easy to get started. Inside the box, you’ll find the Sky Stream device, the same remote that you get with the Sky Glass, an HDMI cable and a power cable, all colour coordinated so you know which plug goes into which hole.
On the rear of the Sky Stream box, you’ll find one HDMI 2.1 port, an ethernet port (if you’d prefer the more reliable connection method) and an aerial tuner (which can’t actually be used). Once you’ve got it all hooked up to your TV, which took us just a couple of minutes, you’re taken through a fuss-free set-up process. Just enter in your wifi details, update the software, and wirelessly connect the remote and any other speaker systems you have paired with your telly.
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There are still whispers of this being the Sky Stream puck. When updating the software during set up, the Sky Stream box was constantly referred to as the Sky Stream puck, making it evident that the device is just a re-skinned product with a slightly different name. That doesn’t stop it from being a nifty little device, however, even if it does easily pick up dust.
Unlike the Sky Glass TV, which commands attention, the Sky Stream is happy to be invisible. You don’t need to keep it in the remote’s line of sight to get it to work (once you’ve paired the remote), so you can hide it away in a TV unit. That’s because it works via Bluetooth instead of infrared. We’d also recommend pairing it with your TV too, or you won’t be able to increase or decrease the volume without your main remote control handy.
Sky Stream features and interface: What’s it like to use?
The Sky Stream has a pretty clutter-free interface. Called Entertainment OS, it looks clean, modern and genuinely useful. When the Sky Stream blinks into life, you’ll see a curated list of the best content available from both Sky and various different streaming services – including Netflix, BBC iPlayer and more – under a Top Picks carousel.
After the discovery rail, you’ll find a carousel with a bunch of different categories, including Playlist, TV Shows, Movies, Sport, Kids, Audio and Music, News, Fitness and International. Again, this is more of Sky’s curation at work – the company seemingly picks the best TV shows and movies from all the apps in the library, workouts on YouTube and Peloton in the fitness category, and news segments in the news category.
Below that, you’ll find the TV guide carousel, a “Continue Watching” carousel, and even further down, a carousel of apps. Sky’s collection of apps is fairly limited – there are only three sports apps, with no BT Sport or Eurosport app to be found, and while Spotify, BBC Sounds and Amazon Music are catered for, there is no support for Deezer or Tidal. Although Sky does have pretty much every streaming app covered, other streaming boxes, such as the Amazon Fire TV Stick or the Apple TV+, have larger catalogues. However, we do expect this to improve as the Sky Stream matures.
You’ll then get a ream of genre-based carousels, similar to the Netflix interface, before being greeted with a selection of fairly run-of-the-mill TV games, and finally, the settings. It’s all incredibly simple to use, hopping in and out of menus with the centre button and the return button is actually so enjoyable, we wish every streaming device user interface was as simple.
The remote itself is the same one you get with the Sky Glass. There are quick action buttons to add content to your Playlist, and there’s a voice control button. You can use your voice to do most things – whether that’s open the playlist, launch a TV series or app, turn on a setting or skip forward. Sometimes it took us to the wrong programme, but more often than not, we got where we wanted to go.
Read more: Sky Glass review: A seamless way to watch Sky TV
We’re also big fans of Sky Stream’s multiroom feature. If you’ve got more than one Sky Stream device in your home, each Sky Stream will remember exactly where you left off if you paused a programme half-way through – even if it was on a completely different TV.
The only thing most new Sky Stream users will need to get to grips with is the Playlist. Like the Sky Glass TV, the Sky Stream box doesn’t have native recording. Instead, you have the said Playlist. Whenever you want to record something, you just add it to your Playlist using the button on the remote, and the show will go directly into the playlist. Once you head into your playlist, you’ll be able to see a carousel of content that you can view back.
The catch here is that, unlike Sky Q, it’s all streamed via apps instead of being held on-device. If you’ve added The Traitors on BBC One to your Playlist, you’ll be taken to BBC iPlayer to resume or start watching the show. If you’ve added Love Island to your Playlist, you’ll be taken to the ITVX app to watch the show. You get the picture.
Is that better or worse? In some ways, better, as it’s far easier to navigate through “recorded” content when it’s all organised in a nice little folder of content. But at the same time, adding something to a Playlist isn’t true recording, and inconsistencies due to broadcasting rights issues pop up. Things that don’t occur when recording on Sky Q.
If you’ve added a film that initially aired on Film4 to your Playlist, there’s a chance that you won’t be able to play it unless you buy it from Sky Store, despite it having aired originally on Freeview. Sky won’t tell you if this is the case beforehand, so you might sit down, popcorn in hand, ready to watch The Borrowers, then realise you have to buy it because it didn’t “record”.
If you’ve recorded a match on BT Sport or similar, you might find that it disappears from your Playlist due to rights issues, and if Netflix or Amazon Prime decides to take a show off its service, that will disappear too. It’s not true recording in the same sense as recording on Sky Q. If, for example, you want to record content on live TV with accessibility adjustments turned on, such as audio description, these won’t carry over to the Playlist. The programme’s not being recorded; you’re just being redirected to the catch-up version.
It’s best to think of the Sky Stream as a streaming device first and foremost. If you understand that a certain programme might not be there forever, the Playlist is actually a very efficient, very seamless way of catching up on programmes you’ve missed.
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There are other annoying quirks to the Sky Stream box that might have people opting for Sky Q instead. Because live content is delivered over wifi instead of over a satellite dish, there’s a delay in transmission. That means if you’re watching Premier League action on Sky Sports, you’ll be roughly 30 seconds behind the real-time action happening on Sky Q. If you have football score notifications on your phone, or you’re in a busy WhatsApp football group, chances are you’ll know who scored before it’s actually shown on screen. However, that’s expected from a device over wifi. Most catch-up streaming services, including Sky Go and BBC iPlayer, have a longer delay.
The other strange quirk is Sky’s ad-skipping feature. It’s a little misleadingly titled. You can’t skip through ads per se; you can only fast-forward through the adverts like you would have done if you recorded something on Sky Q. That means it’s still easy to accidentally fast forward past the start of the show.
We found it simpler and more convenient to use the voice remote to ask it to fast-forward three minutes or so, then skip a little bit more (or less). Ad skipping isn’t free either, costing £5 per month, and if you’ve paused live TV, you can already fast-forward through it for free. Not to mention that ad skipping only really works on ITVX, All 4 and Sky’s on-demand content. The feature, which should really be called fast-forwarding instead of ad skipping, isn’t for everyone.
And while Sky TV is now more portable than ever, you won’t be able to pick the Sky Stream up and bring it over to your mate’s house to watch the 8pm match. Sky only allows one household to use the Sky Stream box. If you move it out of the address it’s been registered to, Sky says that it may charge you an additional location charge or suspend certain subscription services for use at that other address.
Read more: Everything you need to know about the 2022 Apple TV 4K
Finally, performance. While we adore the user interface, it can be a little sluggish at times. It almost feels like we’re waiting a second or so for it to go to the next slide in a rail, and typing on the keyboard takes an extremely long time because it feels like it takes an age to press each letter on the keyboard.
That might be because we’re used to using the Fire TV Stick 4K Max, which has a super-fast processor. Sky hasn’t detailed what chip is inside the Sky Stream box, but if it were just that tiny bit more powerful, we’d love it a whole lot more. A way around this is to use voice commands as these work much more quickly.
The Sky Stream should also be getting continuously updated like an iPhone with an annual iOS tune-up. In early February, Sky announced that the Sky Stream would be updated to Entertainment OS 1.1. The update would bring new quality-of-life improvements to the whole ecosystem, including personalised playlists (basically profiles) for five different users; letting people jump directly into a show with just their voice instead of having to go to the landing page first; bring onboard support for Bluetooth headphones; and add a new Cast and Crew carousel, for those who’ve just seen a film with an actor they like and want to watch more. But the update was pulled at the very last minute, so we weren’t able to test the new features.
In terms of picture quality, the Sky Stream is top notch. Content in UHD looked crystal clear, we didn’t notice any buffering on our 65Mbps broadband connection, and Dolby Atmos worked a dream on content that supported it. Everything looked sharp and clear, and sounded great. The big bonus is being able to use your own telly instead of having to buy the Sky Glass – there are better TVs out there.
Sky Stream pricing and plans
There are a number of different bundles available when purchasing the Sky Stream box. It comes in two packages in its most basic form: either on a 31-day rolling contract or on an 18-month contract.
Those who lock themselves into an 18-month contract will pay £26 per month and receive a Sky Entertainment package, which includes all of Sky’s originals, all the HBO content via Sky Atlantic, as well as over 100 channels that you won't get on Freeview. You also get an additional subscription to the Netflix basic tier as part of the package. If you’d prefer to pay on a contract-free basis, you’ll pay £29 per month.
Sky often runs various deals throughout the year, with the company most recently reducing the price of the entry-level Sky Stream package to £24 per month, though this deal is no longer active.
Read more: These are the top new TVs to get excited about in 2023
Is it cheaper than getting Sky Q? It is if you sign up for an 18-month contract. While you’ll pay £33 for Sky Q over 18 months, you’ll pay just £26 per month with Sky Stream, and Sky Q requires an engineer installation, which adds an additional fee. You also have to pay extra if you want HD channels on Sky Q, but it comes as standard with Sky Stream.
Where Sky gets you, however, is with the fairly obnoxious add-ons. If Sky can charge for it, the company will. It’s an extra £6 a month for Dolby Atmos and UHD. Want to skip ads during an on-demand show or in a programme that you’ve added to your playlist or in an app? That’s another £5 a month, please and thank you. And you will, of course, have to pay extra if you want Sky Sports, Sky Cinema, BT Sport and Sky Kids.
If you’ve had Sky in the past, you’ll be familiar with this add-on structure, and it’s as annoying as it’s always been. Still, you’ll do just fine with the basic entry-level package, and if you want to add on a sports package, it’s oddly cheaper on Sky Stream compared to Sky Q (£25 per month versus £32 per month).
The verdict: Sky Stream
While the Sky Stream isn’t the most perfect device in the world, if we had the choice out of Sky Q, Sky Glass and Sky Stream, we’d choose Sky Stream every time. It’s cheaper in the long-term, especially for those wanting to subscribe to Sky Sports, we enjoy the nice and simple interface, and we don’t have to ditch our current TV for one manufactured by Sky. Sure, the Playlist feature might be a little marmite – especially for those used to recording content in the traditional way – but it feels like the future in terms of streaming.
We’d like to see the Sky Stream get a boost in processing power so that it’s slightly less slow, but it’s one of the most hassle-free and enjoyable ways of watching our favourite content, with crystal-clear picture quality and even more updates on the way.
The best Sky Stream deals
Sky Stream box: Free for a month, Sky.com
Right now, Sky is offering the Sky Stream box and a Netflix subscription completely free for a month, with no up-front cost. You’ll get the box and a Sky TV subscription, with all the entertainment channels, including Sky Atlantic. You’ll then pay £29 per month, or £26 if you opt for the 18-month contract. Not impressed? Just cancel before your trial period ends.
Get the Sky Stream box for free now
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