Sky Stream review: The smart route to a smart TV?

Sky has played a core role in pay TV in the UK for the past couple of decades. From the excitement of putting a satellite dish on the side of your house, to dominating Premier League football and Formula 1 coverage, Sky is almost as British as a cup of tea.

Sky Stream is the most important evolution of the Sky package for some time. Some may see it as an offshoot of Sky Glass, the company’s all-in-one TV package, but to me Sky Stream is the solution, the future of Sky.

But Sky comes with an ongoing cost, begging the question of whether it’s worth diving in with Sky, or if sticking to broadcast TV and streaming services makes more sense? I moved all my TVs over to Sky Stream to investigate.

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The Disconnekt Downlow

Sky Stream boasts a massive content library, including exclusive shows as well as Freeview channels. It eliminates the need for a satellite dish, making it perfect for TVs that only have access to a Wi-Fi connection. Occasional connection issues and a quirky user interface can hold it back at times.

Sky will give you access to content you won’t find elsewhere, but there are also ongoing costs. Even at a basic level, if you’re not going to be watching Sky’s content and just streaming, then your money would be better spent elsewhere.

Buy from £28 a month from Sky

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The reasons you should choose Sky Stream

Sky has, for a long time, been all about the content. There have been big moments in TV viewing over the past decade that have been dominated by Sky. Access to HBO shows like Game of Thrones is probably the best example, because if you didn’t have Sky, you’d have to buy it on Blu-ray at great expense after the fact or stream it at lower quality on Now. But Sky didn’t get to where it is because of drama shows, oh no. It was sport, or the Premier League to be precise.

Having access to more live games than any other TV platform. In the 2023/24 season Sky had 128 games, TNT Sports had 52 games and Prime Video got 20 games – and in the 24/25 season, Sky will take a bigger slice. Then there’s F1 coverage, exclusive to Sky, the Golf Masters, cricket, tennis and more. Yes, you have to pay for it, but Sky’s offering is often better than getting it via another route.

Sky was once known for movie access and that still exists through Sky Cinema, alongside a whole range of other entertainment. But that’s not what makes Sky Stream good: perhaps the most compelling argument for Sky Stream is that it’s all streamed. That includes terrestrial TV content and it solves a particular problem: if you want to watch the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 or Channel 5, Sky Stream will stream that to any TV.

That means you can put a TV anywhere you have Wi-Fi, rather than being constrained by the need for an aerial. When I built a kitchen extension, I ignored the additional wiring from the roof aerial, because streaming is the cleaner solution. Freely will rival this and I don’t doubt that in the near future other platforms will stream everything, but at the moment, Sky Stream is a cut above because of the comprehensiveness of the offering.

There’s not much to say about the box itself. It’s compact enough to hide behind a TV, it supports 4K HDR and Dolby Atmos and while you’ll get this from streaming services like Netflix (as long as you have the correct subscription), Sky charges extra for UHD and Dolby Atmos on Sky Cinema content.

There are settings in Sky Stream to determine the output so you can match your TV and this includes a passthrough option for audio, so if you’re connected to a receiver, you can have the dedicated hardware do the decoding. Audio format for live TV comes across with 5.1 where it’s broadcast, but UK catch-up services only seemed to offer two channel audio.

The box is primarily designed for a Wi-Fi connection (and I’ve waxed lyrical about that already), but confession time. As I had Ethernet running to my main TV already, I hooked the box up to a wired connection instead. That’s something you might want to consider doing, which I’ll talk about below.

Sky’s interface is bright and colourful, stuffed full of content to make discovery a little more interesting and it’s easy enough to get back to whatever streaming service you were watching by scrolling left. The live channels also appear close to the top so it doesn’t feel like you’re always being railroaded to watch Sky’s own content.

It’s worth noting that Sky loves to handle your subscriptions (it basically assimilates your Netflix subscription) though if you already have Netflix that doesn’t really matter. But in some cases, it wants to run content through its own EPG rather than that app – Discovery+ for example. If you have a separate subscription, you’ll have to access it via the app, rather than the EPG channel, because the two don’t integrate.

What Sky Stream could do better

Sticking to the user interface and there are some elements I’m not so keen on. When you press the home button your current channel or show keeps playing, which can be annoying, especially if returning to the home screen was because you’d finished watching and didn’t want to continue. That show will just keep playing, unless you select something else.

The settings menu is also harder to access than it needs to be, it’s right down the bottom of the page, so in the initial phases of Sky Stream ownership, it feels like you’re forever scrolling – but every platform has its foibles and nothing here is too significant.

What is more significant is platform stability. Sometimes it’s just hard to turn the box on. I’ve experienced this on multiple boxes and know other users have too, where you press the power button and nothing seems to happen. It then seems to be into a process of tapping until it’s on and then it’s off and you jab at the button and then it’s on again. First time power on never seems to happen.

At the same time, Sky Stream will often report that it has no connection, blaming your Wi-Fi, when actually, it’s just the box being silly. It’s never a permanent thing, it just takes a little longer to connect than it should.

There are settings to counter this, however. In the standby settings there’s the option for “networked standby mode” and “overnight power saving”. These are both designed to reduce energy consumption, but if you are having problems, this is the first setting to change to see if it solves the issue. Sometimes, however, I just have to pull the plug to get the box up and running.

The remote is reasonably comfortable to use and I had no problem making it adjust the volume of my TV and AV receiver that I connected to Sky Stream, but I don’t find myself using many of the buttons. It’s mostly the D-pad and there are no shortcut buttons to services or anything else, it just feels a little generic.

We have to talk about Sky Stream costs

For all the content that Sky Stream brings, there is a cost that comes with it – and the cost is one of the bigger aspects to think about. At a minimum, Sky Stream costs £28 a month on a rolling 18-month contract. If you want a 31-day rolling contract, it’s from £31 a month (at the time of writing).

That gets you Sky Entertainment and Netflix. The Netflix side of it has a value of £4.99 a month, so you’re paying £23.01 for the hardware and Sky Entertainment, which includes Sky Originals, Sky Atlantic, Sky Max, Sky Comedy, Sky Nature, Sky Documentaries. You also get access to Discovery+, Eurosport, Comedy Central, National Geographic and MTV, as well as Freeview channels like BBC, ITV, Channels 4 and 5 and the other 250 channels.

So there’s a lot of content, but worth remembering that all the Freeview channels are free to view already, and a standard TV will be able to receive those channels at no cost. About the only thing that’s missing is access to Twitch.

There’s also a £39.95 activation fee, although you might find you get this free, or reduced, depending on what options you choose.

Adding to the costs after that is any of Sky’s more exciting content – Sky Cinema and Sky Sports for example – as well as the UHD and Dolby Atmos package if you have the home cinema system to support it.

What is all means is that Sky Stream isn’t cheap. It gets you access to content that’s exclusive to Sky, but you do have to pay for it. With that in mind, Sky Stream only makes sense if you’re consuming that content: if all you’re going to do is watch Netflix, you’d be better off with a Fire TV Stick from Amazon, as you’d have covered the cost of the Stick within two months of subscribing to Sky.

Should you buy Sky Stream?

When it comes to accessing content, Sky is one of the best options out there. Sky has a lot to watch in its locker and while other platforms have some exclusive content, none seem as expansive as Sky. That has to be at the core of your decision: get Sky Stream because Sky has content that you’re going to watch all the time – because if you’re not, then you’ll be able to get your entertainment fix elsewhere.

But Sky Stream also has advantages, offering streaming of all those Freeview channels which is currently unmatched elsewhere, meaning it’s perfect for a TV in any area where you don’t or can’t have a wired aerial, but do have Wi-Fi. There are some foibles when it comes to connectivity and power, but these feel like the sort of thing that should be resolved with software updates and have never presented anything more than a minor irritation.

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