Thoughts on the Sky Go app.

[Anonymous]

Isn't it time for Sky to stop using the annoying, low quality Sky Go player? Please adopt a web player like all other streaming services. Get better quality and save us from that horrible and laggy Cisco streaming container you're using now. \o/

Moderated thread title to remove petition from title as per community guidelines

[Anonymous]

It would definitely be nice to have a web UI in the same way Now does, and you're right it does seem quite old fashioned to have a desktop app for streaming these days.

Perhaps they're working on something, but as far as I'm aware there's no public roadmap to know.

Theoretically it would be cleanest if they provided access to Now linked to your Sky account, but the channel list is quite different so I understand why they've not done that.

[mmm57]

I would agree!

Plus it's not working in a usable manner on my 24h2 Win 11 ARM laptop but working fully on my Win11 24h2 Intel laptop. If you read back over the various discussions other people have had similar issues and possible cures but nothing consistent.

In fact some people seem to have it working on ARM but some have similar issues on Win11 24h2 on Intel, some believe they have solved it by installing a previous version of windows 11, installing SkyGo then updating windows!

This has been a recurring theme for several months in various forms.

This would indicate that maintainance of SkyGo is of a low priority and has perhaps become too complex for all the permutations of windows.

As the discussion starter has suggested, surely this issue could be resolved by going to a browser based version. If security is an issue how do other streaming services control this?

[Anonymous]

I imagine that when Sky Go launched having the app was the best approach but at this point rewriting it for the web is probably a major project and they have other priorities at the moment. 

[mmm57]

They have an advertised service that doesn't work for many people and it's not a priority!

I will not be adding to this thread.

Thanks

[Anonymous]

I'm not saying it's NOT a priority, only Sky can answer that, I'm just hypothesising. 

[Anonymous]

The app is created by Cisco. They bought the license because it offers slightly overly intrusive abilities to detect what other apps you're running, in what I can only guess is a useless attempt to curb piracy. Because dodgy box providers are known to sell sub 720p, 25 fps pirate streaming services. Right? The only thing they achieve is to deliver a terrible service to us who are paying for it. Remember, Sky subscribtions are probaby the most expensive media subscritptions in the world, and the company delivers the abolute worst pre-2010 quality services.

Swtiching from Cisco's horrible application isn't a compilacted task. When Netflix failed with their first global live stream of a mojor event about half a year ago, they immediatly sat down and figured out a working solution. A few months later they offered flawless streaming of the most views regular season NFL matches ever. It is only hard if you don't want to fix it.

[Hammer909]

The root cause of this is that the SKY Go player for Windows is buiilt on legacy tech (VideoGuard) orginally designed for smarttcards on STB's (e.g. SKY Q). It is resource intensive, buggy and very old hence all these continual issues windows which are not present with IOS and android clients for SKY Go which are excellent in my experience (search on Cisco/Synamedia VideoGuard for more on this).

The newest SKY 'stuff' i.e NOW Webplayer, SKY Stream and Glass use a new generation of tech so eviedntly a concious decision by SKY not to release a modern windows client (like NOW has, so how hard would it be ?)  . Given the cost of a SKY subscription this is really poor in my view givenn the long history of issues with  the client as it is a very well know issue to the engineering teams given the amount of issues in the SKY forums. So would be great to get an informed view from the SKY GO team on their view of this issue, roadmap as personally i also dont understand why SKY is not just an app on my smart tv alongisde netflix, prime, iPlayer and all the others. (and just like  SKY NOW !! ).

A bit more context below courtesy of AI. 

Sky Glass / Sky Stream:
These run on Comcast's Entertainment OS, a unified platform built on Comcast's global technology combined with Sky's UI, Xfinity's voice navigation, and shared metadata systems — a completely different software stack from the old Sky Q/VideoGuard world. Comcast hasn't published exact DRM specs publicly, but given Entertainment OS is IP-streaming-only (no satellite tuner, no smartcard), it almost certainly relies on standard Widevine/PlayReady-style multi-DRM rather than VideoGuard's smartcard-based conditional access, since VideoGuard's core design is built around securing broadcast/satellite feeds and smartcards, which Glass and Stream don't use at all. Comcast

Confirmation from an unexpected but telling source:
A post from a satellite/DRM enthusiast forum explicitly states that Sky introduced a web player using Widevine and was "deprecating their only decent solution (VideoGuard)," and separately notes the UK has Widevine officially enabled alongside PlayReady in other markets. This lines up with what you'd expect: Sky's move to IP-delivered, app-based platforms (Glass, Stream, and the newer web/NOW players) is genuinely a shift toward the same industry-standard DRM (Widevine, PlayReady, FairPlay) used by Netflix, Disney+, etc. — VideoGuard is increasingly a legacy fixture tied specifically to Sky Q and the old Sky Go Windows desktop client. Linux Satellite Support

So the picture is:

• Sky Q (satellite/box) → VideoGuard (deep legacy integration)
• Sky Go Windows desktop app → still Cisco/Synamedia VideoGuard (hence your ongoing issues)
• Sky Glass / Sky Stream / newer web players → Entertainment OS, apparently moving to Widevine/PlayReady

This actually makes the Sky Go Windows situation feel more like an orphaned legacy product — the rest of Sky's ecosystem has clearly moved past VideoGuard, but the old desktop client hasn't been rebuilt on the newer stack yet. That's likely part of why it's had so little dedicated engineering attention.

[TimmyBGood]

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@Hammer909 wrote:

 So would be great to get an informed view from the SKY GO team on their view of this issue, roadmap

That's not going to happen: Sky Group just doesn't operate in that way.

as personally i also dont understand why SKY is not just an app on my smart tv alongisde netflix, prime, iPlayer and all the others. (and just like  SKY NOW !! ).

Presumably because a great deal of the value for which Comcast (over)paid was the three decades Sky has had as a hardware company.  I suspect they'd find it extremely difficult to convince users to pay a minimum of £25+ a month for an app...

[Hammer909]

SKY dont have a choice as that is the way the wider market has evovled to given pervasive high bandwidth connections to the majority of the UK.  Apps on Smart TV's for film, sport, news and everything else SKY delivers as content is done more efficiently by the competition via IP streaming so genuine question don't they need to evolve in order to compete ?

[TimmyBGood]

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@Hammer909 wrote:

don't they need to evolve in order to compete ?

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Quite possibly, but the Comcast Corporation can choose to operate its Sky Group division in any way it sees fit (including spinning it off into an entity based around NBCUniversal)