@BrownBear91 wrote:
Hello, I signed up to Sky Stream as part of a TV+Broadband bundle offer that Sky were offering towards the end of last year. I want to understand from the community what their experience has been with these two different offerings?
It's entirely dependent on a number of factors.
Sky Stream suits many people perfectly well, but it relies entirely on the customer having and maintaining a fast and stable broadband connection in order for it to function with any form of reliability.
Sky Q on the other hand relies entirely on the installation and maintenance of a satellite dish and cabling in order for it to function. Sky are responsible for this, not the customer. Part of the installation process is the Sky engineer making sure that a signal is being correctly received and that the hardware is functioning. Sky Stream is entirely self-set up - there is no engineer support. The customer is responsible for installation and setup of the Stream puck hardware and service.
Both systems are very capable but are very different in functionality.
If you like the idea of recording what you want, when you want, setting recordings remotely whilst away from home, and watching things back at your leisure with the ability to easily fast forward and rewind then Sky Q is ideal. It has a range of streaming apps available on the Q box which are functional but really not the best in terms of the quality they can offer. The Q hardware is around a decade old now and it remains an excellent satellite recording device but a mediocre streaming device.
Sky Stream may be more modern and entirely available via broadband, but it still has its quirks compared to Sky Q. Picture and sound quality can be excellent, slightly better than on Q, but it's much glitchier in comparison, particularly in busy households where speed and stability of network connection can fluctuate. Sky Q's signal can only really be affected by extreme weather whereas Sky Stream's can be affected by wall thickness, channel interference, bandwidth fluctutations, etc. Improvements can be made by connecting via ethernet, but this may not be possible for all.
The lack of recording on Sky Stream can also be difficult for some customers to come to terms with. Most content not watched live will play back via an app, or direct from Sky's servers. Fast forwarding and rewinding is slower and glitchier than doing the same on a Sky Q recording because it's playing back from a stream over broadband, rather than from a local hard drive.
If you are already a streaming household, then Sky Stream can be a revelation. Having all the channels live streamed, with the ability to channel hop with ease can be great if that's important to you. The playlist is a different form of logging viewing and it can work well, depending on if the broadcasters keep the associated metadata for their programmes up to date and Sky's servers correctly keep track of it.
The key difference between Q and Stream is that Q gives the customer more control over their viewing. You choose what to record, and what to delete from your choice of programmes. Sky Stream relies on broadcasters and Sky's UI keeping track of the programmes on a customer's playlist. Q lets customers set remote recordings from the SkyGo app whilst they are away from home. Sky Stream has no such facility - you cannot add anything to your playlist whilst away from home.
There is no correct answer as to which service is better. Each can suit different people. If you want 4K Sky content on multiple TV's in your household and have a rock solid network throughout your home then Sky Stream could be amazing. Sky Q cannot give you this. The Q miniboxes are limited to HD and many people struggle to maintain a connection between miniboxes and their main Q box.
My experience of Sky Q was a good one. I really liked it (once I got a quiet box). I had no need for multiscreen so only ever had the one main box but it worked perfectly for recording broadcasts, which is exactly what I wanted it to do. I never used the apps on it as they were slow, clunky and limited in what they could do.
I switched to Sky Stream because we wanted rid of the dish following some building work on our house. It's fine. Not great. Just fine. It does what it's supposed to but could (and should) be a lot better than it is, especially more than 3 years after it launched. As a household we've found ourselves regularly frustrated by it. It requires a lot more housekeeping by the customer than Sky Q ever did. Regular reboots, remembering to properly exit apps, lip sync issues, etc. All quite irritiating things.
We like streaming though and wouldn't ever go back to Sky Q, it's just that we're now experimenting with alternative hardware and finding that there are much better ways of getting the same content than using the Stream puck. I think the days of Sky Stream in our household are unfortunately numbered.
