Sky Glass: price, pre-order delays, and everything you REALLY need to know before you buy

As promised during its launch event earlier this month, Sky Glass is now available to buy in the UK. Well, sort of. Only Sky VIP Diamond and Platinum customers – that’s people who have been with Sky TV for eight years or more – are currently able to place an order for the feverishly-anticipated new QLED TV. Sky will be slowly rolling out the custom-designed TV to more customers in the coming days and weeks.

If you’re itching to get your hands on Sky Glass as soon as it becomes available, you should register your details below. Once all of the Diamond and Platinum customers who want to move to Sky Glass and up-and-running, Sky will move onto people who have pre-registered. So, don’t endlessly refresh the order page on the Sky website hoping to jump to the front of the queue – put your name on the list.

If you’re not completely sold on the idea of Sky Glass quite yet, the slow roll-out of orders means you have a little longer to think it over. And there are definitely things to mull over with Sky Glass. After all, this product marks the first time that Sky has untethered its popular paid-for television service from the satellite dish.

While NOW, formerly NOW TV, does offer access to a number of the same live channels and on-demand boxsets available on Sky Q over an internet connection, Sky Glass is something very different. This is the first time we’ve seen the complete Sky Q experience – including Ultra HD and HDR content – beamed over broadband.

That brings the total to 40Mbps. While that still seems comfortably below the 70Mbps average – remember that is the total bandwidth available at home. If you’re watching Sky Glass downstairs in Ultra HD, while other family members are watching in their bedrooms, someone is streaming from Spotify, smartphones are downloading a new software update, and children are playing video games online… that 70Mbps speed will quickly be gobbled up. If that happens, you could find the quality of the show you’re watching dips – like when BBC iPlayer or ITV Hub is buffering – or the broadcast stops entirely. 

If you’re lucky enough to have a strong fibre broadband connection at home, there are still a few points to mull over with Sky Glass.

Sky Glass overhauls the record feature for the first time since it was introduced with Sky+ back in 2001. Instead of a red Record button on the redesigned remote, Sky has added a new + symbol. Tapping this button will add a series, episode, film, concert or match to your Playlist. In a nutshell, Playlist is a supercharged version of Series Link on Sky Q, which automatically schedules a recording for every upcoming episode.

With Playlist, the software will also scour Sky boxsets as well as the libraries from any synced streaming services – like Disney+ and Prime Video – to bring together previous series and episodes too. Jumping into your Playlist, you’ll be able to catch up on old episodes from across a range of streaming services and tune-in each week as new episodes air on Sky channels. Sky hopes its new Playlist system will prevent you from having to jump between its menu and another streaming app on its service to find the right episode.

Crucially, all of these recordings will not be stored on a hard-drive inside Sky Glass, but streamed from the cloud. The advantage of not writing everything to a whirring hard-drive inside the box (like you’ll find inside the Sky Q box) is that you’ll never have to worry about running out of space. Since everything is being stored by Sky, you won’t need to delete a three-year-old episode of Graham Norton to make way for a new series. You also don’t need to worry about power cuts or signal problems interrupting the recording because, you know, you’re not actually recording anything to your box.

However, Sky has quietly confirmed plans to introduce an extra charge for Sky Glass customers who want to fast-forward through the adverts in their recordings.

Yes, since everything in your Playlist is streamed to your Sky Glass, recordings work in the same way as streaming an episode on All4 or ITV Hub. And exactly like the latter, which offers customers an optional monthly fee to eliminate the ad breaks, Sky Glass will charge viewers to remove all advertisements from the episodes that are streamed from its servers.

Prices rise even higher if you want a Sky Stream Puck (£10 a month for Multiroom to stream around the house, plus a one-off £50 fee per Puck) or a bigger screen. The 55-inch model costs £17 and 65-inch £21 per month.

There’s no doubt that Sky Glass will be perfect for some viewers – bringing flagship features like Ultra HD and HDR picture quality and Dolby Atmos sound to the selection of movies, US dramas, and sports available exclusively on Sky TV without the hassle of drilling a satellite dish onto the side of your home. However, some might be better off looking elsewhere …even when orders do open-up to everyone in the UK.

Speaking about Glass during the launch event, Dana Strong, Group Chief Executive, Sky said: “Sky Glass is the streaming TV with Sky inside, providing the total integration of hardware, software and content. Built on over 30 years of understanding what our customers want, this is a TV that only Sky could make. We believe this is the smartest TV available, and that customers will love it.”