Sky Q is no longer available to buy
As of 2024, Sky Q isn't offered as a new product anymore. This is because the provider now offers its content through its streaming box, Sky Stream.
If you're a current Sky Q customer, your service will continue to work as normal. But anyone looking to get Sky TV for the first time will instead be offered Sky Stream.
Pros and cons
Sky’s premium TV offering is market-leading for good reason, but it’s not for every budget. Here’s our verdict on the Sky Q set-top box and service.
Sky Q box pros
Unrivalled choice of content
Customise your experience
Seamless mobile and multiscreen access
Sky Q box cons
Price and additional charges
Amount of options can be overwhelming
Existing Sky customers still need an engineer visit
What is Sky Q?
Sky Q is the main satellite TV service run by European telecoms giant, Sky. It’s the latest, most comprehensive version of the provider’s long-running, subscription-based pay-TV offering.
While it’s still fundamentally a satellite television product, Sky Q offers a huge range of internet-connected services. This includes streaming platforms like Netflix, on-demand box sets and films, catch-up TV and a revamped mobile app for watching content on the go.
It comes with more recording capacity than ever before, ultra-HD and 4K options. And it’s all experienced on a modern, intuitive interface for easy navigation across different menus.
But it comes at quite a hefty price. Is it worth the money? Read on for our in-depth Sky Q review to find out.
Sky Q box design and setup
The Sky Q box is a lot more compact than older Sky TV boxes, and it has much more storage capacity. So not only is it less bulky, but it doesn’t skimp on the amount you can record. The 2TB Sky Q box can now handle up to six recordings at once, so you’ll be spoilt for choice on things to save and watch later.
It’ll easily fit into any TV cabinet or shelf and will look tiny next to some older DVD or Blu-ray players. It has a modest, matte black finish with a silver strip spanning the bottom, so it’ll blend right in with any other hardware you have.
It also has a couple of front-facing lights — an ‘On/Standby’ and a red ‘Recording’ indicator. They’re noticeable but also very dimmed, so they won’t be distracting while you’re watching TV. The Sky Q box also does away with the huge blue ring light that would constantly rotate if you were in playback mode on an older Sky box. Which is something I don’t think any of us will miss.
The Wi-Fi connection seems very strong, with little-to-no dropouts in connection. In my home, we usually keep ours behind a closed, wooden lattice cabinet door and sandwiched between two other electrical devices, yet we don’t experience many issues. However, if you want to guarantee a good connection you’ll probably want to allow it more space to connect to your router properly.
Sky Q boxes
Sky provides four different Sky Q boxes depending on the service you choose:
Sky Q 2TB (with 4K Ultra HD)
Sky Q 1TB (with 4K Ultra HD)
Sky Q 1TB (no 4K Ultra HD)
Sky Q Mini (multiscreen box)
The Sky Q box you receive will depend on the amount you’re willing to pay for your service. The most expensive box comes with more storage for your downloads and recordings and is capable of 4K Ultra HD viewing, whereas the cheaper options have less storage and lower viewing quality.
Our best Sky TV deals
Want a bigger and better TV package? Check out the latest Sky TV deals on Uswitch.
Installation
You’ll need an engineer to visit and install the Sky satellite before you can start enjoying Sky Q. You’ll be prompted to book this when you sign up for your package. Sky will likely charge an installation fee of £29.95 for the work, depending on the deal you sign up for.
Even if you already have a Sky dish, you'll still need an engineer to visit your home and install Sky Q. This is because it uses new technology that older Sky satellite dishes don't have.
Sky Q voice remote control
Sky Q comes with an advanced smart remote to make searching for your content on the Sky Q box and Mini Q boxes as easy and accessible as possible.
The Sky Q voice remote control is perfectly built for Sky Q’s excellent keyword-based voice navigation, which lets you fast-track through all the menus to find what you want to watch. This makes it really easy to locate specific TV shows and films. You can read more about how Sky’s voice search function works later in this review.
The remote offers a range of intuitive playback buttons towards the top of the remote, so it shouldn’t take long at all to learn how it works. Also, the Back button has some very handy uses, such as taking you back to the live broadcast on your current channel without having to spend lots of time fast-forwarding.
In addition, thanks to Bluetooth technology, its signal to the Sky Q box is incredibly strong. Gone are the days when you actually have to point the remote towards the box for it to register a button press. You can now do it from pretty much anywhere in the room.
And if the kids like taking the remote with them around the house, it's now super easy to find if it gets lost. Just press the Q at the front of the main Sky TV box and the remote will start beeping to help you locate it.
How does Sky Q work?
You can find content on Sky Q in a number of ways, depending on when or how you’d like to view it. Here are the main places you’ll be able to find your TV shows and films.
Sky Q homepage
The main page you see when you first turn on the Sky Q box does feel a bit like an advertising billboard. Most of the screen is taken up by a large sky-blue display of a highlighted TV show (almost always one produced by Sky itself). This is followed by a lot of content recommendations based on new releases and what’s popular.
As you scroll through the suggestions, you’ll quickly notice that it’s just an infinity display of stuff, most of which seems irrelevant and a little bit overwhelming. While it’s a good sign that you’ll never run out of things to watch, it’s not an especially useful page. You’ll be better off using the much more familiar TV Guide or Recordings menus.
As Sky Q learns your viewing habits, it will start to tailor its recommendations to you a little more. And it will occasionally offer a real gem that you won’t want to miss. So don’t disregard it completely, but don’t trust it to be too helpful.
Sky Q TV Guide
The TV Guide remains largely unchanged in looks and function, now just in the newly-branded blue Sky Q decor. It doesn’t have all the features that the iconic Sky+ TV Guide used to have, but that doesn’t necessarily make it harder to navigate.
Instead of searching by channel number, you can scroll down the left sidebar to find the type of content you’re after, and the relevant TV guide for that area will appear instead. This is similar to previous versions of Sky TV, but there are now more specific options to choose from so you can find channels a little easier.
When you select a channel on the TV guide, the mini preview in the top-left corner will display what’s currently being broadcasted. All you need to do is select it a second time to confirm that’s what you want to watch, and you’ll be taken to the full channel view.
The greatest update, though, is that you can create your own customised TV Guide that exclusively features the channels you’re interested in. This saves all of that wasted time wading through channels you’ll never watch to get to your favourite shows.
Sky Q box sets and recordings
The amount of content available to watch on-demand with Sky Q is incredible. While recordings have long been a staple feature of Sky, Sky Q’s connection to the internet means that almost all of the content it has the right to show can be downloaded onto your Sky Q box and watched anytime.
For shows that Sky Q can broadcast but not offer on-demand (often due to copyright laws), you now have more space and capacity to record content on your box too:
- Sky Q 1TB: Record three shows simultaneously while watching a fourth
- Sky Q 2TB: Record six shows at the same time while watching another
This is a massive increase compared to previous versions of Sky. And it’s a good move from the provider to keep up with the significant rise in customers watching TV on-demand whenever they want.
How easy to use is Sky Q?
Sky Q’s interface is quite easy to navigate. Many long-time customers will already be familiar with much of the interface, and a lot of the new features are easy to search through. There’s also the handy fallback of voice control for anything that’s too hard to find by scrolling through menus.
Navigating menus and voice search
While all the options you’re offered on the homepage are a little overwhelming, it does mean that you could quickly see something you like the look of and hit play.
The TV Guide has lost some of its revered features, and the pure wealth of on-demand content might be hard to wade through if you’re looking for a particular show.
But that’s where voice search comes in. Simply hold the Sky Q remote’s microphone button and say the name of a show, channel, genre or even cast member. Then all relevant results across all channels and multiple apps, including Netflix and Disney Plus, will just appear ready to watch, save or record. It’s very convenient.
You can also voice search with Sky Q to find personalised recommendations on what to watch. If you ask 'What should I watch?', the results will take your previous watch history into account and suggest content based on what it thinks you like. This saves a lot of the time you would have spent just aimlessly scrolling.
In recent studies, voice search has been found to return less accurate results with female voices, as well as regional and minority accents. This is due to voice recognition software often being created by a majority white and male team of developers, which has led to a lack of diversity in the testing process.
If you’ve found that voice recognition devices haven’t worked very well for you in the past, here are some tips for getting the results you need:
- Know what you’re going to say before you say it. This might sound a little obvious, but it’ll prevent any gaps in your speech that might be mistaken as the end of your sentence.
- Be as direct as possible. Try to stick to the keywords of what you want — the title of the show, name of the actor, channel name, genre, etc.
- Keep it instructional. Don’t worry about asking it — that just uses up unnecessary words. Starting phrases like ‘Show me...’ or ‘Find...’ will do perfectly!
Sky has recently added a new accessibility setting to its voice search function to make the voice experience a lot easier to use for customers with visual impairments.
Named Voice Guidance, it works by playing spoken descriptions of the menu you're currently on and explaining how to easily navigate from where you are to the content you want to watch.
Navigating full channel view
As usual, Sky Q will show you information about the show you’re currently watching in full channel view by either pressing Select or Information. However, when scrolling through nearby channels or shows scheduled later on, there are now a number of helpful and intuitive features to give you a better idea of what else is on.
The mini-menu now also shows a small display of what’s playing on other channels, so you can get a first impression of the show before confirming you’d like to watch it. The video on the mini-menu is muted, so you could technically have both shows running at the same time if you wanted.
Playback
Pausing, rewinding and fast-forwarding on Sky TV haven’t changed a huge amount in recent years. It continues to be seamless and just plain great for watching TV on your own terms.
The only real difference is that you can now fast-forward a lot quicker than 30x, by pressing fast-forward and then holding down the right button for however long you need to. However, the on-screen image won’t fast-forward with you if you do this, so it’s a little bit of a guessing game to get to the right bit.
If you’re trying to pause a show to study a particular scene or shot, the slider will appear and block part of the screen. To make sure you can see the entire display, just hit Back when paused and the whole screen will become available again.
Some channels also offer the ability to play a programme from the beginning if you happened to join it halfway through. This is mainly a feature for Sky’s own channels, rather than other ones that Sky doesn’t have the same rights to.
What can I watch on Sky Q?
As you may have gathered, the range of content available on Sky Q is wider than ever before. From traditional satellite channels to catch-up options and streaming services, there is so much television to choose from.
Here are the main ways to watch content on Sky Q.
Sky Q channels
As usual, Sky Q has hundreds of satellite channels that span just about every topic you can think of. While you aren’t likely to ever watch most of them, it’s the choice that you pay for when you go with Sky TV.
You can also access additional exclusive content like Sky Sports or Sky Cinema by paying an extra monthly fee. Sky Sports in particular is an expensive add-on, but the premium sports content you get as a result is worth the money for many people.
You can access these channels either through the TV Guide, which you can navigate using the topic sidebar or by typing in the channel number while you’re in the full channel view. You can also ask the remote to take you to a specific channel.
On-demand
A large amount of the content that’s shown on Sky’s channels is stored in the cloud and available to download to your Sky Q box. This includes box sets of many different shows as well as past one-off programmes that are featured on Sky channels.
The main downside is that Sky doesn’t have the rights to all the TV programmes that are broadcast on its channels. So you still might end up missing certain shows that you weren’t able to record in time.
Some shows that Sky is allowed to offer on-demand will also only be available for a temporary period. Therefore if you see something you’ve wanted to watch for a while, you might have to get in quick.
Apps and streaming services
The beauty of Sky Q’s excellent connectivity is that catch-up and streaming services are in healthy supply.
If you don’t have a smart TV, a Sky Q box will turn your TV into one. All of the following apps, plus many more, can be accessed within the Sky Q interface:
Netflix
Disney Plus
BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds
Amazon Prime Video
All 4
YouTube
ROXi
Fiit
Watching Netflix on a Sky Q box
Netflix was the first streaming service to be added to Sky Q. Once you select the app, you’ll quickly notice that it’s just the same Netflix app you’ll see on a smart TV — just hosted within the Sky Q experience.
Sky is now offering bundled pay-TV deals that contain a Netflix subscription. So you can merge both monthly payments into one cheaper bill if you like making use of both services.
Our best Sky TV deals
Want a bigger and better TV package? Check out the latest Sky TV deals on Uswitch.
Picture and sound quality
HD is so commonplace in screen tech nowadays, it’s actually easier to find a new TV with 4K Ultra HD picture quality than it is to find one without. But despite how ubiquitous the technology has become, Sky still charges customers £5 extra per month to watch HD channels.
This feels like an unnecessary policy to have in 2021, especially given that it already offers a premium service of Ultra HD (or 4K) programming for an extra cost of its own.
There are now dozens of HD channels available to watch, most of which have replaced their standard definition versions in the TV Guide ( BBC Two HD is now channel 102, for example). So putting the highest-appearing channels behind a paywall could lead to some issues with user experience for those who don’t have the HD add-on.
Ultra-HD and 4K options
The latest high-quality screen tech to be broadcast in our homes, Ultra HD (UHD), is fast making its mark on consumers. Sky Q’s highest-priced options include access to Ultra HD content. But channels are quite a few and far between unless you decide to pay extra for Sky Sports or Sky Cinema, where the benefits of UHD can really be seen.
While there are already 8K TVs on the market, it takes TV broadcasters and services much longer to support new screen technology than it does for TV manufacturers to produce them. So expect Ultra HD 4K to become the highest-achievable quality for quite a few years to come.
HDR on Sky Q
Sky Q now supports content in HDR, which stands for High Dynamic Range. This is a relatively new picture technology that offers a much wider colour range, which means images are a lot more accurate and brighter.
Most TVs that are sold nowadays can display HDR technology, but it's taken a while for certain TV services to show HDR-compatible content. Now Sky has introduced support for it, select TV shows and movies will be able to display even more realistic colours, with fewer dark spots obscuring the picture in low-light scenes.
Sky started by allowing HDR content through its Netflix and Disney Plus apps, but has since introduced it to select programmes on its Sky Originals, Sky Nature and Sky Cinema channels as well.
Sky Q Multiscreen
Multiscreen continues to be a great perk of Sky TV, especially as families start to develop different viewing needs as kids grow older.
Sky Q’s multiscreen service works through its Mini Q boxes, four of which can run from the main Sky Q set-top box. You can watch Sky on two TVs at once with the 1TB Sky Q box, and up to three at the same time with the 2TB box.
You’ll be able to set individual parental controls for each box, depending on what limits you’d like to place on different family members’ content. They offer full HD content and connect to your Wi-Fi so you can watch on-demand and online content.
You will need to pay a monthly fee of to access Sky Q Multiscreen, and each Mini Q box comes with a one-off charge. So it might work out cheaper to get a streaming stick for around £50, and then create different profiles for your family members on the streaming services you already pay for.
Make sure your broadband can handle it
With more online content being viewed on different devices at the same time, your household’s demand for broadband could go up pretty quickly. You’ll want to make sure that you have a broadband speed that can handle lots of high-quality streaming all at once.
Here’s a quick look at the broadband speeds each streaming quality needs. While this won't apply for broadcast channels that work through Sky's satellite TV, all on-demand content on the Sky Q box will need an internet connection to work.
Standard definition streaming — 1.5Mbps
HD streaming — 5Mbps
Ultra HD / 4K streaming — 25Mbps
Compare broadband deals with Uswitch to find broadband packages that can handle a house of streaming.
Sky Go App
After a brief affair with the Sky Q App, Sky has changed its tune and decided to focus all its attention on revamping Sky Go — the original mobile TV app for customers to watch content on the go.
The new-look Sky Go app is now in the suave Sky Q colours. And thanks to Sky Q’s well-established online content offerings, the app experience is now more seamless than ever.
There’s a TV Guide option for live channels from wherever you are. But it’s also very easy to browse and watch catch-up TV, box sets, sports, movies and more all from within the app.
You can also download certain on-demand shows to your device and watch them offline without needing to connect to the internet. Just make sure you have enough storage on your device.
The available channels aren’t as extensive as they’ll be on the main Sky Q box. But even if you can’t watch a certain show on the app, you’ll be given the option to record it to your Sky Q box instead.
Sky Q parental controls
Sky Q offers a range of parental controls for when your children are watching TV.
Its long-standing PIN-protection security feature remains., So you can stop your kids from accessing inappropriate content, as well as purchasing certain shows and events. But there are other measures to take in case your PIN is discovered by the kids.
For young children, Kids Safe Mode is a surefire way to give your child free reign of the TV without the risk of them watching anything they shouldn’t. It’ll restrict all available TV shows and movies to ones with a U rating.
These parental controls can also be applied to multiscreen boxes and the Sky Go app. This will give you peace of mind when the kids are watching content on their own devices.
Is Sky Q worth it?
Adding together all the services you can access via its set-top box, Sky Q offers the most extensive roster of TV programming and online content available in the UK. Its service is top-quality and the TV viewing experience it provides is second-to-none.
The issue is, Sky knows that. And therefore it’s very happy with putting large price tags on its premium offerings and add-ons because many people are prepared to pay a little extra for a lot more.
Deciding whether Sky Q is worth it for you depends entirely on the TV you don’t want to miss out on. If you can’t miss live Premier League football matches, if you’re desperate to catch the TV premiere of a movie the day it arrives, or if you want to experience content in stunning Ultra HD quality, you’ll have to cough up more for the privilege.
And if that’s something your budget will allow, you should by all means go for it — you likely won’t regret your decision.
If you’d like access to some of Sky’s exclusive content but aren’t keen to pay the expensive fees for a bunch of channels you’ll never watch, a good alternative would be NOW TV.
It’s still owned by Sky, so it offers the same content as Sky Q, but in packages that let you pick and choose the type of content, you watch a lot better. It’s not as premium a service, but it’s a great way to view Sky channels without forking out for the entire Sky Q experience.
Here are the different TV passes on offer with NOW:
Entertainment pass (popular entertainment channels on Sky)
Sports pass (Sky Sports channels)
Cinema pass (Sky Cinema channels)
Kids pass
hayu pass
Freeview channels
View all of our NOW deals at Uswitch.
Our best NOW deals
Want access to all the great content from Sky without signing up for a long-term contract? Stream what you want, when you want with our latest NOW TV & broadband deals on Uswitch.
