Sky Glass Gen 2: Why IS Sky’s all-in-one TV so popular?

The launch of the second-generation Sky Glass 2 TV on Tuesday was a big moment for the TV hardware scene in the UK. Not because it heralded a huge step forward for panel tech, audio smarts or the user experience but because so many people buy these TVs. In fact, in 2024, Sky Glass became the best-selling TV in the UK. 

For enthusiasts like me and (I hope) you, dear reader, this is a bit of a puzzle. For all of Sky Glass’ convenience, its built-in Atmos sound and its plug-in-and-forget approach, it is undeniably inferior in many ways to the more traditional approach to building a TV-based AV system.

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Simply put, for the same money, you can buy a TV with better picture quality and a soundbar with more dynamic output and then pair it with a Sky Stream box for pretty much the same experience.

Sky, of course, would disagree. At the launch, it said buying Sky Glass Gen 2 would save customers 30% over buying an equivalent TV and soundbar. And although, yes, that might be true if you were to buy, say, a mid-priced mini LED TV and a premium Atmos soundbar, you can go a lot cheaper and still get great picture quality and audio.

The 55in Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED (below) is £699 right now and the Creative Stage 360 Atmos soundbar is £125. Buy those together, and you’re spending a total of £824. That’s £125 cheaper than the Sky Glass Gen 2 55in.

So why have so many people been buying Sky Glass? It can’t be image quality because, although perfectly fine, the original Sky Glass just can’t match the best mid-range TVs on this front. Sky Glass Gen 2 might well be better – I certainly thought so on my initial viewing – but will it be good enough?

The answer is that there are plenty of reasons to buy a Sky Glass Gen 2, and the number one on the list has to be how easy it is to buy. Sign up for Sky Glass and you immediately get the option to spread the cost, either over 24 or 48 months. It’s a lot easier to justify splashing out more than you might ordinarily spend on a TV when you’re paying a smaller amount monthly.

Next on the list is convenience. Not everyone wants or is allowed to attach a satellite dish to the outside of their home and Sky Glass provides most of the content you can get via satellite, over your home broadband connection.

It’s easy to forget, but before the introduction of the first Sky Glass TV, the only way to get Sky Sports in 4K in the UK was to have a man come around and screw a whacking great satellite dish to the outside of your property and then snake cables into your living room to your Sky Q box. He had to drill a hole in your wall, your box couldn’t then move position and you still had to add a TV and a sound system, if you could be bothered.

So yes, it’s easy to see why Sky Glass is so popular, especially with folk who have grown up with satellite TV. Here’s a TV you don’t have to do any of that with. You don’t have to worry about satellite dishes, inconvenient cabling, or connecting separate sound systems and multiple speakers.

You don’t even need to find room in your AV unit for a separate streaming box, because most of what you need – from premium Sky Sports to third-party streaming services – is all built into the TV. The only cable needed is the power cable, plus perhaps an HDMI cable for your Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5.

Sky Glass is a beguilingly simple proposition and it ticks so many boxes for the average TV watcher that perhaps the question should not be “Why do people buy these things?” but “Why aren’t MORE TVs like this?” Why don’t more mid-range TVs build in halfway-decent audio systems? Why aren’t they easier to buy? Why don’t their streaming platforms work as well as Sky’s?

I guess that’s a question for the TV manufacturers themselves, but if Sky Glass Gen 2 can nail picture quality, those manufacturers might have a bit of a problem on their hands.