This summer offers a mouthwatering menu of sports, from football to track-and-field, tennis to golf. For sports fans looking to overindulge, Sky Glass, the 4K TV from Sky, brings the high decibel, high drama of the live experience to the living room.
Sky Glass leverages Sky's decades-long legacy of sports broadcasting, ensuring sound and vision are precisely calibrated to recreate the in-stadium experience. The TV's Auto-Enhance feature locks in optimum sports-specific settings automatically, removing guesswork and fiddling with settings so you can sit back and enjoy the action.
"What we're trying to achieve with Sky Glass is amplifying the experience without you having to think about it," says Mark Witter, Sky's managing director of global product management. "We are covering a huge amount of sports so we know how the cameras are calibrated on the ground or at the event. We want to make sure people are getting the best representation of that at home."
Launched in late 2021, Sky Glass offers a simple, seamless internet-based viewing experience for sports fans—no dish, no box, no fuss. Sky subscribers were struggling with a physical mess of cables, controls, and inputs, adding a random audio kit, juggling multiple remotes, and sticking with non-optimal factory settings. In multiuser households, it led to chaos, confusion, and subpar sound and pictures.
Sky Glass comes in three sizes—43-inch, 55-inch and 65-inch—and cleans up that mess, offering all the features, functionality, and automation needed in one elegant set. It boasts a 4K Ultra High Definition Quantum Dot screen with 8.3 million pixels and a six-speaker sound bar delivering 360° Dolby Atmos® sound.
Sky Glass features a built-in soundbar, armed with a forward-firing center speaker and subwoofer, two side-firing speakers, and two upward-firing speakers, all synchronized to deliver enveloping surround sound. And the soundbar’s six speakers are just as critical to delivering an immersive sporting experience as the screen’s crystal-clear visuals, according to Witter.
“Our audio engineers spent hours analyzing the frequency of key moments in sport events, when the football is kicked, a racing car is overtaken, a cricket ball is hit. We wanted to understand what the mics had picked up and how we could best reflect that in the home experience.”
The 360° Dolby Atmos® sound immerses you in the roaring crowd while smart audio mixing brings clarity to the clamor. “The up-firing channel is a good place to have the crowd noise because it’s not competing with the commentary coming out of the center speaker,” says Witter.
Largely thanks to Sky’s efforts, sports coverage has moved beyond fuzzy footage of foggy league fixtures. The highest quality cameras capture the action from all angles and every penalty shout, pit stop, and trickling putt is subject to expert analysis. But as Witter notes, if the on-sofa sports fan wants crunchy-tackle realism, they also want context and characters.
“The fundamental human needs around sport haven’t changed, the passion, the surprises, but now people want more storytelling,” he says. “So in Sky Sports coverage you see more time with coaches and players. It’s not just interviews in the tunnel, there are people on the pitch, interactions from the studio, really bringing characters to life. Our content partners are also creating great narratives around sport.”
Sky’s innovative operating system, Entertainment OS running on Sky Glass, autonomously learns and evolves as it gets to understand your sporting passions and allegiances, suggesting and surfacing a range of sport-specific content, from highlights to documentaries, movies and even YouTube videos. “We want to create these immersive destinations which pull together all the relevant content without you having to think about it too much,” says Witter.
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Of course, while some fans want to sit back and take in the action, others want a more interactive experience, to surface stats and switch camera angles. Sky Glass allows motorsport fans to take in races, qualifiers, and practice sessions from the perspective of the drivers and listen to team radio. Golf fans can move from hole to hole. And all of this is still delivered in 4K ultra high definition.
“Some sports allow themselves to offer different feeds,” Witter says. “We want to alert people to the fact those feeds are there without distracting from the experience.”
The Sky Live camera, exclusive to Sky Glass, encourages another kind of interactivity. The Watch Together feature means that families and friends, separated by space if not time, can come together to watch a match or event. “Effectively you have a video call running alongside the coverage. And our engineers worked a bit of magic so if somebody wants to pause the match while they fetch some beer from the fridge, they can pause the match for everyone watching. We also did a lot of work on the audio so you can decide the volume levels of the banter coming through the soundbar and can push the commentary into the background.”
Of course, new capabilities and possibilities become available on a regular basis. Sky Glass’ Entertainment OS is constantly adding new functions and refining existing functions, often in response to customer feedback.
VR and MR are touted as the next big technological leap in sports coverage and Sky has been ahead of the curve in experimenting with the virtual sports experience. Broadcasters are also taking advantage of new technologies and generative AI is already a valuable tool. Sky leverages it to create Recap, AI-edited highlight reels that allow viewers who missed part of a game to quickly catch up with the key bits of action.
But Sky Glass still delivers the optimum living room experience for sports fans, according to Witter. “That is really where the enjoyment is for most people right now,” he says. As sports fans prepare for a long hot summer of high-drama matches and medalling, Sky Glass promises to immerse you in the action with a full fridge and takeaway close at hand.
Find out more on sky.com
Requires a Sky TV subscription. Ultra HD and Dolby Atmos® pack required to watch Sky content in UHD/HDR and with Dolby Atmos®. Content must be optimized to watch in Dolby Atmos®. Minimum broadband speed of 30 Mpbs recommended. Content subject to availability.
