What They Say
Sky in the UK is making the ‘smarts’ from its Glass (almost tuner-less) TV available as an STB even for those that don’t have the Glass TV but do have the Sky Q service. The Glass system is based on the Comcast X1 platform.
The box will give the same services but does not have support for Dolby Atmos, which the TV does have. We were also amused to see that some media outlets had confirmed with Sky that it ‘will not have … quantum dot display technology’.
It will cost £50 ($54 + tax) and will be out ‘later this year’.
What We Think
Frankly, I would have been more than a little surprised if the puck had been able to deliver quantum dot technology to other TV sets! I assume that Comcast in the US may also offer the option later.
I was a bit ‘sniffy’ about the Sky Glass. Although the concept of a tunerless set is one I have espoused for a long time (and this is nearly tunerless – you have to dig to find the details in the reviewer’s guide), I was a bit disappointed that the set didn’t seem to have particularly great performance. However, my opinion has been moderated by two things.
- One of my daughters said that she was thinking of getting one as she rarely watches anything that is not streamed and it seemed a good solution to her because of the simplicity.
- I met an exec from Sky at a recent SMPTE event in the UK. He explained to me that one of the motivations for developing the set was that Sky thought that there a number of optimisations that they could make in the set based on knowing the type of content, especially sport, which has been the backbone of Sky’s appeal in the UK. The idea was to include some metadata in the stream to signal the type of content and trigger the optimisations. However, set makers were not keen to get involved so Sky decided to do it themselves.
I like the idea of standardised metadata for different kinds of content, but it would need to be standardised, I think, by DVB or others. (BR)
