One of the most traditionally annoying things about watching live sports over cable or satellite has been the delay such delivery systems tend to introduce to the feed compared with simpler broadcast approaches. Hearing your neighbors roar when a goal goes in or getting a ping on your phone with a score update before you’ve seen the goal happen on your supposedly ‘live’ feed can’t half spoil the moment.
British subscription broadcaster Sky has in the past been one of the biggest culprits of this feed delay problem – ironically to some extent because of the effort it puts into delivering premium experiences complete with next-gen picture and sound quality and various background features. Over the past year or two, though, it’s managed to massively reduce the time its own broadcasts take to appear on its own Sky Glass TVs and Sky Stream boxes. And now, in the nick of time, Sky’s also managed to reduce the time that live World Cup broadcasts from the U.K.’s BBC and ITV broadcasters take to pass through Sky’s distribution systems.
The so-called Real Time technology behind this, originally introduced for some of Sky’s own live sports coverage, streamlines the production and distribution path of these specific broadcasts to a point where the pictures are delivered ‘almost instantly’, to use Sky’s own words. Sky doesn’t provide an exact latency time figure for its Real Time broadcasts (which are essentially live streams when they’re appearing on Sky’s Glass TVs or Stream set-top box), but it does add ‘within seconds’ to its ‘almost instantly’ comment, stressing that it will be fast enough to avoid most types of potential spoilers from ruining your World Cup experience.
For the World Cup coverage, Sky has chosen to stream the Real Time match broadcasts from the BBC and ITV on dedicated channels rather than trying to organise the more complicated process of embedding them within the regul. You can access these dedicated streams either by choosing to opt in to them from the regular BBC and ITV channels, or by switching directly to channels 926-944 for different regional BBC RT channels; channel 945 for ITV1 HD RT; or 946 for ITV4 HD RT.
Sky has confirmed with me that switching to the low-latency “Real Time” BBC and ITV channels won’t require you to put up with any reductions in picture quality compared with the broadcasts being shown on the regular HD BBC and ITV channels. The footage will simply arrive faster. Though I should add that the Real Time channels don’t give you the 4K broadcasts available via the BBC iPlayer app. But the feed delay of these 4K iPlayer feeds will be substantially higher than that of Real Time channels.
The new Real-Time World Cup feature joins other sports-friendly features already offered on Sky Glass TVs such as a Sport picture preset that presents the matches with a crisp, cool, vivid look, Watch From Start that lets you jump instantly back to the start of the game, pause and rewind features, and hands-free voice control that lets you jump straight to the match coverage simply saying, for instance, ‘Hello Sky, England vs Croatia’.
If this sounds like the World Cup Experience you’re looking for but you don’t currently have a Sky set up, Sky Glass TVs are currently available for 20% off their usual prices up until June 17, meaning Sky Glass Air prices start at £4.50 a month (for the 43-inch model), while the more premium Sky Glass Gen 2 TVs start at £11 a month (again for the 43-inch model).
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