Since I first saw Sky Q at its launch last year, I've been itching to try the system out. Finally, I've had my chance, as Sky let me sit down with a working system to see how its new smart TV platform works. In case you've managed to miss some of the announcements, Sky Q is the company's new TV platform, introducing what Sky calls 'Fluid Viewing'.
In simple terms, it's about letting you watch your content (broadcast and recordings) where and when you want, rather than having to sit in front of the living room TV with a Sky+ HD box. When I first saw the system demonstrated it looked completely revolutionary and something that would change how premium TV is consumed. If Sky could get this right, then it would have the massive advantage over Virgin Media, with high-quality TV that streams and lives throughout your home. So, has Sky got it right? Well, my first hands-on impression will reveal all.
Before I start, I have to say that the one thing that I don't know about the system is pricing. Obviously, it's one of the most important things about the system and a high price could put people off. As it stands, my hands-on look at Sky Q is more of a chance to give you an impression of how good the system is; I'll update this page with pricing and my views on it once it's announced.
What is Sky Q?
Sky Q is a collection of products that form an entirely new TV platform, delivering live and on-demand TV throughout your house and even outside of it. I’ll go through the specific product offerings in detail later, but at the heart of the new system sits the Sky Q box. This replaces your Sky+ HD box with a more powerful PVR that has 12 tuners (for the top-end Silver box), a bigger hard disk and is Ultra HD ready. So far, a big improvement but more an evolution; however, it’s how the Sky Q box interacts with everything else that makes it different.
First of all, you can use the Sky Q Mini box, which wirelessly connects to your Sky Q and lets you watch live TV, on-demand and recordings, all independently and without interrupting your main box. Next, the Sky Q app lets you do all of the same stuff as a Mini, but from your tablet. Everything is seamlessly synced between devices, so you can start watching a programme on one, then continue exactly where you left off on another device. This all forms part of Sky’s ‘Fluid Viewing’ mantra. There’s nothing else in the UK that can do this for premium channels.
To top everything off, there’s a new Sky Q hub, which replaces your router (you have to be a Sky internet subscriber) and gives you 802.11ac Wi-Fi and powerline networking all-in-one; it also turns your Mini boxes into Wi-Fi repeaters, giving you better wireless coverage throughout your home. The Sky Q’s powerline networking is proprietary, however, so it won’t work with other HomePlug adaptors. You’ll be able to have an engineer enable the powerline networking at the time of install.
The Sky Q Silver and Sky Q boxes
As I mentioned, it’s the Sky Q box that is at the heart of everything, with the Sky Q Silver box the top-of-the-line model. It’s about half the size of the Sky+ HD box but has an incredible 12 tuners inside it. That works out as four tuners for recording, one dedicated to the live channel, one dedicated to picture-in-picture (PIP), two dedicated to Q Mini boxes, two dedicated to Q Apps, one tuner for data such as images, and one spare reserved for future use. That means that no matter what you’re doing elsewhere or recording, you can always choose a fresh live channel to watch. It should mean an end to recording clashes forever.
^A live picture-in-picture view of other channels in the EPG makes it feel far more dynamic
Cleverly, the box only requires two cables to be run from the satellite dish, and the box can handle decoding the channels. With the old Sky box, each tuner required a dedicated cable. The change is a massive improvement and requires the LNB on the dish to be upgraded to WiBand LNB. The new LNB is not compatible with Sky+ boxes or Freesat, so once you’ve been engineer upgraded there’s no going back.
Inside is a 2TB hard disk (1.7TB available to customers), which gives you room for around 350-hours of HD programmes. Of course, it can download on-demand programmes at the full broadcast quality (other catch-up services use a reduced-quality streaming version for catch-up), and connect to the Sky Store for movie rental and purchase.
There’s an HDMI 1.4 output (HDCP 1.2), which Sky says will be upgraded after launch to support Ultra HD. Quite how this upgrade works or what it does is yet to be announced, but I'd expect HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 for Ultra HD. Indeed, that's the specification used by the BT Ultra HD YouView box. Ultra HD content will be delivered live through your satellite and on-demand over the internet. There’s, intriguingly, an HDMI input as well, although Sky has said that this is for future use.
The Sky Q standard box only has 1TB of storage (700GB available) and won’t support Ultra HD. There’s one tuner for live TV, three for recording, one tuner for a tablet and one tuner for a Sky Q Mini box as well as the data and reserve tuners. If you’ve got a lot of televisions and tablets in the home, need more storage or want to take advantage of Ultra HD when available (see, our best TV guide for the top 4K models), the Silver box will be the one to go for. Both boxes look far sleeker than the Sky+ HD boxes and have a low profile that’s unobtrusive. The uninterrupted circular LED might be a little distracting, however, as it’s rather bright. The way it lights up and animates is attractive, however.
Sky Q Mini box
If you want the same experience that you get in the living room in other parts of your house, the Sky Q Mini box is the product for you. This box can connect via Wi-Fi (802.11ac) or Ethernet to your Sky Q box, and plugs into a TV via HDMI. If you go for the optional Sky Q Hub, you can also use the box's integrated powerline networking. It gives you exactly the same interface and experience as the main box, down to letting you set recordings, watch and pause live TV, view any downloaded shows (or start new downloads) and watch your previous recordings. That’s a huge change in how Sky works and even people with multi-room can’t watch recordings on one box elsewhere in the house. Recordings streamed to Q Mini boxes aren’t compressed, either.
Sky Q Touch Remote and Interface
The brand-new Sky Q Touch Remote is the biggest change to the Sky remote since the service launched. It adds a touchpad, as the name suggests, for quicker navigation and dedicated buttons for search, a new sidebar feature, series-link record and to jump to your recordings.
The remote uses Bluetooth, so you can even hide your Sky Q or Sky Q Mini boxes out-of-side and it will still work. A useful feature is that you can press a button on the Sky Q box to make the touch remote begin beeping, making it easier to locate if you often misplace it. Of course, this won’t help you if you for whatever reason lose the remote control outside of Bluetooth range of around 20m.
I found the remote's touchpad took a little getting used to, as it’s quite sensitive. With more time it’s likely something you can adjust to but, hopefully, there will be sensitivity adjustments. A particularly nice touch when using the touchpad is that an animation on-screen is synchronised with your touch inputs, helping to mentally relay your inputs to what’s happening on screen. As you slide right on the touchpad to navigate forwards in the menu system, a small glint of light appears on the menu and follows your touch input. It makes navigating intuitive. Still, it remains to be seen how all users will get on with the touchpad, especially older viewers. There is a non-touch remote available, too, which is used with the Sky Q Mini boxes. The Q Mini remote will also work with the Q if you would rather not use touch.
Above the circular touch panel are media playback controls. These are also touch-sensitive and you can slide your finger left and right to adjust rewind and fast forward speeds. This was incredibly slick and intuitive and makes jumping to the right part of a programme a simple affair. Generally, the physical buttons on the remote feel more pleasant than the slightly spongy, rubbery buttons on the old Sky remote.
There’s an integrated microphone for voice search, although the feature will not be enabled until after launch. We were told that natural language searches can be expected, so you can give commands such as ‘Films starring Tom Hanks’ to get relevant research results. If the system is anything like as good as Siri on the Apple TV, Sky will be onto a good thing here.
Of course, Sky has made a huge change to the interface, redesigning it completely for HD (and beyond) TVs and the new remote. The whole interface is based around vertical lists and panes. In navigation, the interface is not dissimilar to what we’ve come to expect from media streamers, such as Roku boxes. You navigate vertically to find what you want and navigate right to make selections. Backing out of menus require that you go left. Sky says the interface is designed to reduce ‘cognitive load’ or brain effort. A fancy way to say the interface is as easy to navigate as possible.
This applies to other aspects as well, such as default options. When you press the Record button on the remote to record a programme, it defaults to a series link now. A second press will change it to recording just that individual episode. Sky says this is how most people want to record programmes and simplifies the process. Certainly with the larger hard disk you’ll have less need to micro-manage your storage.
One of the big changes is that Recordings (previously Planner) now lets you view Most recent recordings or order them by A-Z. You can also see what’s scheduled to record, and what you’ve downloaded, purchased or rented. In other words, finding your content’s a lot easier.
On the main menu, there’s the new My Q section, which shows you recently watched recordings and episodes of your favourite shows. You’ll also easily see if new episodes have aired. You can think of it as your centralised hub of content and it makes switching between devices really easy, as you can quickly find what you were watching and continue. The other interesting aspect is My Q’s recommendations. It provides recommendations that are context-aware, based on time, day and the Sky Q or Sky Q Mini box being used. If you often have children’s programmes on in the morning in the kitchen, such as immediately before the school run, for example, you’ll get relevant recommendations. Conversely, in the evening, you might get recommendations based on dramas you’ve watched for the living room.
Other menus include Sports, which brings together all live sporting events in one place. If you’re a sports fan it means finding something to watch is easy. It also puts an end to not knowing what channel a certain event is on and searching through all of the channels. It can be broken down into different sports, such as football, and you can even do a search for a specific team to get all relevant programmes.
Search, in general, is also dynamic and updates based on search trends. As an example, during the hands-on, beginning by typing ‘A’ brought up ‘Alan Rickman’ as his recent death would lead people to search for his films.
A Kids menu displays content based on channels, as younger viewers tend to have stronger channel affinity, according to Sky.
The new sidebar feature lets you access quick information from Sky apps without interrupting your viewing, including Sky News and Sky Sports. There’s also a Facebook Photos app for getting your photos to your television. A weather app lets you easily check the weather. New apps can be added, so it’ll be interesting to see how this service evolves. Something based around Twitter could be useful for following the social media conversations around a certain programme, for example.
The abundance of tuners also means for some nice touches and visual flourishes within the Sky Q interface, such as a live preview of other channels while navigating the EPG. This takes advantage of the PIP tuner and makes the Sky Q interface feel fresh and dynamic compared to the static and dull interface on the Sky+, which is showing its age. The new EPG is also context-aware, so it will dynamically pull up information on previous episodes or recommend other relevant programmes or movies.
Sky Q App
The new Sky Q App replicates the new interface and lets you do everything you can do from a Q Mini from your tablet, letting you watch what you want anywhere in your own home. I only had a chance to try out the iPad version but you’re supposed to get an identical experience from the Android app.
For the first time ever, you can also synchronise recorded and downloaded programmes to your tablet, using Q Sync, letting you watch content offline. You have to be in your home to synchronise and there’s no option to sync over the internet, which means you can’t pull down your latest recordings while you’re away.
A Download to iPad option lets you know what is available on your Sky Q box to download. If you’re looking to download recorded live TV content, the Sky Q box will transcode it and transfer to your iPad. If you’re looking to save video on-demand content, the Sky Go equivalent will instead be downloaded to your tablet. The Sky Q app essentially integrates and replaces the existing Sky Go app. You’ll then have 30 days to start watching the content, although it's deleted 48 hours after you start watching.
In terms of the catch-up services, what you can download to an iPad is a little trickier. BBC iPlayer content can’t be saved at all, and the other terrestrial providers’ content is dependent on the licensing around individual programmes.
Slightly disappointingly, the Sky Q app can’t be used as a remote for your main Sky Q box. With Sky+ HD you can browse through your EPG and recorded content on your phone or iPad and then start watching on your TV. This isn’t an option with Sky Q, but this was supposedly a conscious decision to simplify the viewing experience. This was to avoid having to ask viewers where they wanted to view the content. I personally don’t think this would have been confusing and using a touch interface to find content to then watch on your television is something that a lot of us are used to. You’re able to stream video stored on your main Sky Q box to your tablets without any compression.
New content
While you still get all of the premium content that you most likely signed up to Sky for (HBO TV, sports, films and so on), Sky Q is also expandable and can take apps from other providers. At launch, this means you get YouTube and Vevo music videos; other apps will come although Sky is not saying who it’s doing deals with. The Vevo app is a custom app for the Sky Q. The YouTube app also supports the DIAL protocol, so you can easily find YouTube videos on a smartphone or tablet and have them play on your television, via your Sky box.
Conclusion
Having had some time with the Sky Q platform, it’s hard not to be excited. It finally sees premium subscription television brought bang up to date with how people actually watch television today. It’s all about multi-screen viewing.
The new Sky Q interface is slick and attractive and makes finding programmes and films to watch much simpler than before. You’ll get more out of Sky Q if you subscribe to more premium channels, such as the film and sports channels, which is what Sky aims for you to do. You’ll also need to have additional boxes around the home to unlock the platform’s full potential.
Overall, for those that love the premium content that Sky has, Sky Q is simply a better way of watching and something that no other UK provider can match. The one thing that could get in its way is price, but we'll have to wait a bit longer to find out what that is.
In the meantime, you can watch a video of how Sky Q came to be below:
