You've purchased and received your Sky Glass Gen 2, what are your thoughts on how it performs?
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KevNewMedia
This review was written by a Superuser who has received a free Gen 2 device from Sky, as part of the Superuser programme
With the release of Sky Glass Gen 2 I opted to take on the move to it along with Sky Stream from Sky Q. I have documented my journey in the hopes that it will help others make the right decision for them when it comes to Sky Glass/Stream because it is not a trivial decision, there are pro's & con's to both product families.
Delivery & Unboxing
The delivery experience for Sky Glass was nothing short of perfect. Once my order was placed, I was given a guaranteed delivery date with AIT along with delivery options such as unboxing & removal of the packaging, wall mounting the TV, cable managing the TV and more specifically timed delivery slots. E.g. Morning, Before 1pm, after 5pm etc.
On the night before the delivery, I received a follow up email from AIT confirming the delivery & giving me a 2hr slot. The two delivery guys turned up right in the middle of this slot so nice and prompt. This experience is a much better than with other delivery companies I have used, most either don’t give you a slot or only give you one on the morning of the delivery.
Unboxing was simple, there was no tools required, you simply slide the four cardboard holding squares out of the slots and then lift the whole top off. (Be careful to not pull off the cardboard on the top of the TV where the remote, power cable etc are located as they can fall and hit your foot!)
Assembly
I couldn’t ask for an easier assembly, except maybe the weight of the thing. I know a lot of companies, for health & safety reasons, tell you to ensure that you have two people to assemble something, but you can almost always do it yourself. Well with Sky Glass I would seriously recommend two people, the thing is seriously heavy and one wrong move will result in a damaged screen!
The instructions are printed nice and large on a cardboard cutout that comes inside the box, or there is a handy colour version printed on a bit of paper if you prefer. You simply slide the legs onto the metal stand, lock them & lower the TV down onto them, then give a nice push down, job done. I have never constructed a TV so quickly or easily, every other one has been more complicated or required a screwdriver.
Setting up Glass
The setup process is nice and smooth, I liked how it was automatically programmed to my Sky account so there was no need to link anything & it welcomed me with my name. There are a few stages it goes through;
- Updating the software (Took about 5mins)
- Confirming you want to link the pre-defined Sky iD/account
- Parental Controls/Pin (I like how my pin is set to the last 4 digits of my phone number, makes it easy to remember)
- Location of the TV within my home (Helps identify it for casting)
- Setting favourite channels
- Choosing your Sky Glass experience (Standard or Enhanced)
The main feature from the enhanced experience that I liked were the ability to turn the TV on at any time by just saying ‘Hello Sky’ or ‘Hello Glass’, means I don’t have to go hunting for the remote that my partner has inevitability hidden! I also like that it stays connected to the network even when its switched off, this means I can wake the TV up by starting a casting session from my phone which I do often.
Using Sky Glass/Stream & my thoughts compared to Q
After giving the system a run for a while these are my initial thoughts on the whole experience and performance of the TV, specifically comparing it to Sky Q also.
- The picture quality for Glass is good, like really good. Not only does the Sky Glass 2 panel look dazzlingly bright, it keeps natural colours and seems to almost upscale 720/1080p content as it looks better than watching it a TV app or Q. The amount of dimming zones makes the experience a really good watch, you don’t notice much or any blooming on darker scenes. Sky allow you to fully customise the picture settings to exactly how you like it, as well as offering some predefined picture modes if you want a quick setup.
- The sound on Glass Gen 2 is impressive, especially for its form factor. The TV I replaced Glass with was an LG with just using the built-in speakers. The different is night & day especially when trying to listen to dialogue on programmes. The bass is really punchy, and you can tell the ‘surround sound’ option does work with the whole sound seeming to come from wider areas. It’s the first TV where I wouldn’t recommend to friends & family that you get a soundbar. I have a soundbar for my main LG OLED TV and If I had Sky Glass instead I would 100% not need a soundbar.
- The UI is snappy and surprisingly easy to get used to. One of my main fears when changing from Q to Glass/Stream was that I was moving from a locally run system/satellite to a fully streaming platform. My experience in using some companies streaming platforms (I wont name any specifics) has been seriously poor from freezing apps to really slow loading times. However, Sky Glass is a pleasure & breeze to use. Navigating the UI, switching channels & loading OD apps is really quick and even beats the loading time of my LG OLED TV which I already thought was fast.
- Some of the smart/'Enhanced experience' features are really impressive/useful. For example the automatic switch off of Glass when nobody is detected in the room is really good, helps save power and on time of your TV panel.
- The picture quality for Stream is actually better… I don’t know what Sky are doing between the two products but I found the picture quality of both HD & UHD content better on the Sky Stream puck compared to my main Sky Q box. I did a fair test here, both were connected to my LG C3 OLED, watching the same content on live TV and the PQ was markedly better on the Sky Stream puck, especially HDR.
- Playlisting is easier than it seems. The number one fear I had of changing from Sky Q was losing my trusty Hard Drive in the Q box and relying solely on Streaming/OD platforms or Sky’s cloud record/online library. So far my fears were nothing to be worried about, the playlist feature is really good and essentially just turns the ‘Available now’ tab you see on most programmes on Q into your whole ‘recording’/playlist area. As soon as you playlist any programme you’ll find it in your playlist area and it will show you every single season & episode available to view right away. You can browse through all of it and as soon as you’ve started watching a show or got part way through an episode it will appear in the continue watching rail with the exact timeline of where you are in the specific episode.
- Speech! Wow I’m blown away with this feature. You can literally do anything with voice control. You could watch your entire evenings worth of TV content without even touching the remote. Sky Q’s voice control was good, but not amazing. It sometimes got things wrong, you couldn’t control every aspect of the TV and it required you to hold the voice button on the remote. Sky Glass/Stream takes this to a new level you can say any channel name and it’ll just go straight to that channel, you can say any show and it actually understands you 99% of the time, you can tell it to FF/RR and it’ll do that, even skip ads. Enabling the feature to switch on Sky Glass with your voice, like I mentioned earlier, literally means I can sit down, say Hey Glass, tell it the channel or show I want to watch and I’m there.
- Integration. I love how once you’ve logged into all the respective streaming services they all then filter into your Glass/Stream experience with recommendations on what to watch right from the Sky OS homepage. Q has never achieved this level of integration.
- Playlist profiles. I can now finally separate out my content to be watched from everyone else. I don’t have to sift through rubbish that only my partner is interested in to find what I’ve playlisted to watch 😄 a seriously good feature that I would probably not be without now!
- Live Sport. I am an avid sport watcher, I love my Football & F1 so changing from Q was scary because of two main reasons, firstly the lack of Sky Q recording would mean I would be relying on Sky’s watch from start/catch up system if I missed the start of a live event. Secondly, I would be at the mercy of streaming delay so my friends would see something like a goal for example before me and I may even get a phone notification before I saw it on my TV. Now the F1 season hasn’t started yet and I’ve only been able to watch one football match but my experience in that short time has been absolutely fine. The watch from start feature worked perfectly on the football game I watched since I missed the first 10mins, I didn’t even need to playlist it before the event. As for the streaming delay, Sky has a low latency channel for Sky Sports Main Event, you just simply select the ‘Live sync’ button when you tune to SkySportsMainEvent channel so I was actually only about 3-5 seconds behind Sky Q which didn’t worry me at all as that kind of delay is very unlikely to cause a spoiler for me.
- Ad skipping is nice, and in some cases works better than Sky Q FF. When watching native Sky content you get a popup box asking you if you want to skip the ads, simply select skip and your right into the content. This is a great feature and is faster than Sky Q when you have to FF.
- I like how when you are scrolling the TV Guide there is almost always a show banner that appears at the top of the screen, it’s a nice touch that makes the UI feel a lot more refined.
- The watch from start feature is incredibly smooth and useful. Again I had this feature on Q but it certainly did not work as quickly & smoothly as it does on Glass. With Q you had to wait for it to download whereas on Glass it starts a stream immediately. It also feels like there is a lot more content that’s available to watch from start compared to Q, this might not be the case but it certainly feels like it. I also enjoy how you can use the feature to skip live TV ad breaks. If you have the ad skipping subscription, you can use the watch from start feature to stream the show from OD then just skip all the Ads! Finally I also love how I can watch live sport from the start. Whenever I did this on Q it took me to the Sky Sports app and streamed it from the start but the quality was awful. With Glass I’ve been able to watch from start on multiple football games and its stream it in full UHD right from the beginning.
- Apps! The apps on Sky Glass are a pleasure to use compared to Q. Honestly If I needed to use an app previously, I just used my TVs built in apps because the apps on Q are often so laggy or unresponsive. The Apps on Glass are a pleasure to use in comparison and I haven't once thought about using my TVs apps instead.
- Plugging in consoles to Sky Glass is a breeze. I connected my PS5 to Glass and it automatically detected it as a gaming device and switched over. I was able to activate both HDR & ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) on the PS5 without touching any settings on my Sky Glass. It even showed the input as PlayStation with the PlayStation logo which is a nice touch. I did have one issue when playing which was every 5-10 seconds the screen would pixelate for half a second then return to normal. It turns out the cable I was using was either damaged or not fully compliant with the HDMI standard required for 4K, HDR & ALLM so make sure you check your cable if you have any issues!
Concerns/Issues
Speaking about Glass in general I had no issues/concerns with the TV itself, the picture & sound are great and certainly rival most TVs in its price bracket, with the exception of OLED. However speaking more broadly about Stream & Sky OS in general I had a few annoyances which I would like to highlight.
- The requirement for apps for almost all non-sky content. With Sky Q a lot of the OD content was downloadable directly to my Q box and I could watch it in the native Sky player. With Sky Glass/Stream due to the streaming rights on each platform you almost always get taken to the respective services app player to watch the content. E.g. If I wanted to watch the 1% Club on catchup I would have to launch this on the ITX App, unlike Q where I could download it and watch it natively.
- The requirement to individually sign in to each app on each device is a pain. With my order I got Sky Glass and 3x Pucks. For each one of these I have had to sign in for each app on each device so that meant signing into ITV, Disney, Amazon Prime etc 4 times. I know Sky are currently working on a sort of one touch sign in system so it would be nice to see that in its fully working state.
- I cant choose where to watch my content if its available in more than one place. For example, Modern Family is available on both Channel 4 & Disney +. I am halfway through watching it on Disney+ so I wanted to keep on watching it through there. However Sky Glass/Stream takes Channel 4 as the preference when you click continue watching from your playlist area. There is no way to change this within the system settings, the only way to watch it on Disney is to either launch the Disney app manually or scroll down on Modern Family from within the playlist area and click the ‘Watch on Disney+’ button.
- Ad skipping isn’t consistent across the experience. When watching non-sky content in the respective providers app, it doesn't quite work as smoothly as native Sky content. You have to fast forward each ad break with the Sky remote, it would be great if Sky could integrate their native player into each streaming experience, so ad skipping is consistent. Failing that it would be nice to get a premium subscription to each provider as part of the ‘ad skipping’ package. For example, if I have ad skipping with Sky, when I log into the ITVX app on my Stream or Glass device, it should auto activate ITVX premium which would result in no ads being served at all.
- I can’t clear the continue watching area easily. If we have lost interest in a show or accidentally start one there is no easy way to remove that from the continue watching area. You have to go into the respective providers app and find a way to remove it from your account or FF a programme to the end to remove it. Sky really need to put in a remove features for Continue watching
- The mishmash of where you watch content is, in some cases, an AWFUL experience. This issue is linked to the one I mentioned previously about not being able to choose where I watch content, however in this example it is even worse. E.G, I was watching some of the Goldbergs series the other day and for the entirety of season 1 I watched it on All4. Now I am on season 2, Glass/Stream is defaulting to having me watch episode 1 & 2 on Prime, episode 3 on All4, episode 4 on Prime and so on. This is completely illogical and needs to be fixed so I can either set preferences on where I watch content or make the place that content is consumed consistent across seasons of a show.
- Lip sync… I’ve had a couple examples of the well documented lip sync issues so If your on Sky Glass Gen 1 and have these issues don’t expect it to be fixed in Gen 2… Yet. I am assured that a fix is on the way so hopefully this isn’t a long term issue.
- Generally, the 'enhanced' experience for Sky Glass is really good but there is a few items such as the ‘Wake using motion’ feature which I think is silly to have on by default. It would be great if Sky could offer more customisation to the enhanced feature set when you are initially setting up Sky Glass as I wanted to opt for the Enhanced experience for various reasons, but I found the ‘Wake with motion’ feature really silly in 99% of scenarios. Who really wants their TV to switch on every single time they walk through the room?
Overall I am really impressed with the Sky Glass Gen 2, it offers a lot of functionality & raw performance over a lot of other TVs within its price bracket. I also really like the eco system of Glass & Stream, each day I am finding it easier to get along with and the move from Q is way in the back of my head now, I certainly would not want to go back to Q.
If anyone has any questions about the Glass panel or any questions around the migration from Q to Glass/Stream I am of course happy to try and answer them 🙂
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