Sky is rolling out a vitally important upgrade for football fans on Sky Glass and Sky Stream that will help put an end to the annoying latency that occurs when watching games live on TV.
If you’re a Sky subscriber, you may well have experienced this during Euro 2020 while watching England’s run to the final. That moment when you’re watching the game, and suddenly you hear a massive cheer from the neighbor’s house, meaning you know that England have scored – before you actually see it on your own screen. It’s extremely annoying.
Sky says it’s fixing this problem with its new “Real Time” feature, which helps to reduce the signal delay that occurs when watching live games on Sky Glass and Sky Stream, and it’s being launched just before the World Cup kicks off.
Until now, Sky’s football streaming broadcasts have always had a fair amount of delay compared to those from services such as Sky Q, which uses satellite, and Freeview, which uses the TV’s aerial to provide almost real-time coverage of the games. According to this graph from WhatHiFi, the delay on Sky Glass and Sky Stream can be as long as 35 seconds, compared to just 10 seconds for Sky Q and eight seconds for Freeview. With Real Time activated, Sky says it can reduce this delay by 22 seconds, putting it just three seconds behind Sky Q.
Admittedly, it’s still not perfect, but it should be enough to improve your enjoyment of the game and stop you hearing the rapturous celebrations from your neighbor’s house before you actually see the goal scored.
Interestingly, Sky Glass and Sky Stream have supported lower latency for a while, but the feature was limited to the Sky Sports Main Event channel, which is not helpful for the World Cup, because all of the games are being broadcast by either the BBC or ITV.
The Real Time feature works on Sky Glass’s and Sky Stream’s BBC HD, ITV1 HD and ITV 4 HD channels, the company said, and customers will be able to activate it for all of the World Cup games. Note that this means the feature doesn’t work on 4K broadcasts, which means that if you want higher resolution, you’ll need to put up with the 40-second delay on the BBC’s iPlayer, which provides such coverage. The BBC has reportedly been working on ways to reduce iPlayer’s latency for a while, but unfortunately it seems that it’s not yet ready for prime time.
Sky said the Real Time feature will not be switched on by default, so you’ll have to activate it once you’ve switched to the channel. You should see a Real Time button pop up, and all you have to do is select it to eliminate the latency.
The exact length of the signal delay varies based on factors such as broadband speed and how the content is being delivered, but the 20-second reduction is a meaningful and welcome improvement.
