Broadly speaking, Sky Stream – Sky’s dishless TV service – is very good. Sky Glass is decent, too, though held back slightly by the budget TV into which it’s built. However, having now lived with Sky Stream for over a year, I do find myself regularly frustrated by a couple of issues, the most annoying of which is its roughly 30-second delay over Sky Q.
With regular TV, that’s not an issue – a delay of 30 seconds doesn’t make a big difference when you’re watching an episode of True Detective – but with sports, it can be a real pain in the backside.
You need to remember that Sky Q itself is already slightly delayed compared to the live action, so the additional Sky Stream delay means there’s quite a big gap between something happening on the pitch and it appearing on your screen, and this can cause problems. I have lost count of the number of times a goal has been ruined for me by a phone notification – often from Sky’s own ‘Scores’ app. I’m not kidding when I say that, at times, this problem has tempted me to switch back to Sky Q.
Well, I’m glad I stuck it out, because Sky has just announced a fix for the delay issue as part of its Entertainment OS 1.3 update, which will begin rolling out next month. Sky is calling the specific feature 'Low Latency', which is a term that would usually be associated with gaming, but here it refers to a reduction of 'over 20 seconds' to the signal delay. That should put Sky Stream and Sky Glass on a par with Sky Q for punctuality – and I never had issues with goals being spoiled when I lived with Sky Q.
This Low Latency feature is coming only to the Sky Sports Main Event channel at first, but Sky says it will be 'rolled out to other Sky Sports channels this year' and I, for one, am delighted.
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Here's the full list of updates coming to Sky Stream and Sky Glass
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