Sky unveils major feature shakeup for Sky Glass, Stream and Live

Sky has unveiled a raft of new features across its Sky Glass, Sky Stream and Sky Live products in an announcement made at its HQ in west London. Among the highlights are improved personalisation and lower latency for sports broadcasts, among a host of others.

There aren’t any big UI upgrades – your Sky Stream and Glass front end will look much the same as before. However, Sky says it is making changes to the levels of personalisation behind the scenes, to make choosing content far more relevant than before.

In particular, you’ll see two new personalised rails: one for Movies, which is set to be rolled out straight away, and a TV genres rail, which is coming “soon”, according to Sky. It’s driven by what you’ve watched historically and should mean you get to see much more of the content you like to watch at the top of the screen than before.

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Playlists themselves are also getting a boost. Users will be able to assign avatars to each personalised playlist on the device and Sky says it is also adding the ability to follow actors to the playlist.

Voice search is being extended into music apps ROXi and Amazon Music, movie home pages are set to include Rotten Tomatoes ratings and gamers will welcome the addition of ALLM (auto low latency mode), which Sky says reduces latency while playing games by up to 70%. Users will also be able to forward wind and rewind with their voice and even add TV series to playlists with a voice command.

Sky Live, meanwhile – the company’s motion-tracking camera – is getting a couple of new games and a new paid tier for its fitness app, mvmnt.

Perhaps the biggest update, however, is to the way Sky broadcasts its sports events. Starting on the Sky Main Event channel, the company says it has hacked a huge 22 seconds off the delay that is usually added to live sports broadcasts – thanks to various bits of backend processing. That’s much faster, says Sky, than competing streaming services.

Previously, live events would appear on Sky – whether via Stream, Glass or Satellite – around 30 seconds after they happened in real life. Now, the company is promising this will be vastly reduced. That’s obviously a benefit for anyone living near a big stadium, and particularly great for international tournaments – or it would be if the update supported third-party apps. Typically, Sky doesn’t broadcast summer tournaments, leaving it instead to the BBC and ITV.

The new “Low Latency” technology will only be available initially on the Sky Sports Main Event channel “in the coming months”, with Sky rolling it out to other channels later in the year. Most of the other updates will be available either straight away or in May.