I realise I may as well be howling at the moon given Sky's history of not responding to anything, about anything, but if it's useful to anyone on these forums - I switched from Sky Q to Sky Stream 2 weeks ago and here are my first impressions.
If by any chance anyone here has the ear of someone who can see the roadmap for Sky Stream, so much the better.
The first thing to say is that I didn't switch products willingly but I had to move house and the new landlord wasn't keen on having a dish put up - sometimes you have to choose your battles.
In some ways it's actually a better product but that's mostly because Sky Q is already doing things that it was never designed for, and Entertainment OS is bound to be getting more time from the developers.
I didn't think I would take to streaming everything, as I was very wedded to using the hard drive to record programs but I'm getting used to that now - The big problem is that because so much of it is controlled by the broadcasters' own apps, it means that the experience is completely inconsistent depending on what channel you're trying to watch, but hopefully that will come with time.
The most problematic is Channel 4 where starting from the beginning of the show if you join late is a very hit and miss affair and often involves waiting until the end, for it to be uploaded, where of course you then have to put up with unskippable adverts unless you pay a surcharge.
From the Sky side the biggest drawback compared to the old system for me is that all the Sky Pucks work in isolation, so it's a far less joined up experience in a house with multiple TVs. Far more worrying is the fact that they don't communicate with your Sky Go account, so you no longer have the facility to remote record (well, add to playlist) and the TV guide omits many channels - notably the BBC ones, because Sky Go can't see that you are on the same Wi-Fi network as the boxes.
Picture quality is a significant improvement over Sky Q which looked washed out even using the highest quality HDMI cables.
I don't find the interface as friendly as the old one but maybe that's just me being too used to Sky Q for too long.
There's notable bugs (including some I haven't found yet, I'm sure) but the biggest to me is if there's a slightest glitch in the internet connection, it crashes so you have to reboot the box, which is a right faff. In fact Sky Customer Services told me that they recommend using Ethernet wherever possible but even that has the same lack of bounce-back ability.
The biggest frustration from my side has always been that Sky doesn't integrate its products very well with third party, and the opportunity for proper app store seems really squandered - though I fully appreciate that it is in Sky's best interest to have a walled garden, even though it's not in the customers interest. Same reason I guess that you only get Netflix Basic bundled instead of Ultimate with Sky Q - they'd rather you watch their services that go outside their ecosystem.
I'm sure they'll be plenty more to find in the coming weeks, But those are my first impressions which, in short, are that it's not nearly as bad as I expected but not nearly as good as it could be - and hopefully the fact that there's a lot more active development of entertainment OS means that we'll see some of these missing features and bugs fixed a lot quicker.
On balance I'd still rather have kept with Sky Q a little bit longer but so far I've been pleasantly surprised.
