Sky has extended its satellite deal with SES once again, keeping its satellite TV service beaming into UK and Irish homes into the 2030s. It’s the second time in two years that Sky has pushed the end date back.
That’s good news for the millions of homes still watching Sky through a dish and a Sky Q box.
But it may matter even more to Freesat, which relies on the very same satellites to deliver free TV to around a million homes, and whose future has looked shaky for a while now.
There’s just one thing missing from the announcement: an actual end date.
What Sky And SES Have Announced
SES is the Luxembourg-based company that owns and runs the satellites Sky uses to deliver its channels. They sit at 28.2 degrees East, which is the spot in the sky that Sky and Freesat dishes across the UK point at.
Under the new multi-year agreement, Sky will keep using SES’s satellite capacity at that position to deliver TV to households in the UK and Ireland, in a deal SES says runs “into the next decade”. The two companies have been working together since 1988.
Nick Herm, Sky’s Group Chief Operating Officer, said: “As we give customers more choice in how they access Sky, satellite continues to play an important role in how we deliver our services to customers across the UK and Ireland.”
He added that the deal provides “the reliability, reach and service quality we need to continue delivering the viewing experience our satellite customers expect.”
This is the latest in a series of renewals. Back in October 2024, Sky extended its satellite deal until 2029, a year beyond the previous 2028 deadline.
That 2029 date has since become the one we (and plenty of others) quote whenever the future of satellite TV in the UK comes up. Now it’s been pushed back again – and this time, by an unspecified number of years.
So Why No End Date?
“Into the next decade” could mean 2030. It could also mean 2039. SES hasn’t said, and it also hasn’t disclosed how many transponders (essentially, chunks of the satellite’s broadcasting capacity) Sky is renting, or how much the deal is worth.
The 2024 announcement came with a specific year attached, so the silence stands out.
We can only guess why, but the age of the satellites may have something to do with it. The three satellites currently serving the UK from 28.2 degrees East (Astra 2E, 2F and 2G) were launched between 2012 and 2014, each with a design life of 15 years, according to ILS, the company that launched two of them.
On paper, that takes them to somewhere between 2027 and 2029. A design life is a planning figure rather than a hard switch-off date, but the new deal runs past it either way.
SES hasn’t said whether the current satellites will keep going for longer, or whether anything will eventually replace them. Leaving the end date open may simply give both companies room to work that out.
Sky Q: A Long, Slow Goodbye
Sky Q is Sky’s satellite TV box, which needs a dish on your wall and records programmes onto its own hard drive. Sky Glass (a TV with Sky built in, launched in 2021) and Sky Stream (a small box that works with any TV, launched in October 2022) do things differently: they deliver everything over your broadband, with no dish at all.
Those streaming products are where Sky’s attention has been for years. In January 2024, Sky announced around 1,000 job cuts, many of them satellite engineers, as 90% of new customers were already choosing Glass or Stream.
Then, in December 2025, Sky Q disappeared from Sky’s website altogether, replaced by a message pointing buyers to Sky Stream. New customers who really insist on it can still get Sky Q – but not online.
So Sky Q is clearly on its way out. But that exit is a slow one, and this deal suggests Sky is in no hurry to push existing Sky Q customers out the door.
In fact, Sky Q is still getting new features. In August, Sky rolled out its Multiview and Sports Hub features to Sky Q as well as Glass and Stream (though a new Real Time feature, designed to cut streaming delays, was left to the streaming products).
Satellite also still has an edge for live sport: a goal on Sky Q reaches you around 8-10 seconds after it happens, while on a stream you can be 30-40 seconds behind.
Sky knows better than most how slowly some viewers move on. In its response to Ofcom back in 2024, it pointed out that a small but significant number of customers stuck with its old analogue satellite service, even when better digital alternatives were offered at no extra cost.
For existing Sky Q customers, then, nothing changes. There’s no need to do anything, and Sky’s satellite service will keep running into the 2030s.
Just don’t expect Sky Q to be first in line for new features – that honour increasingly goes to Stream and Glass.
Why Freesat Fans Should Care Most
If anything, this news matters even more to Freesat, which has been around since 2008, delivering free-to-air channels – BBC, ITV, Channel 4, 5 and more – via a satellite dish, with no monthly bill beyond the TV Licence.
It was originally launched to give homes with poor aerial (Freeview) reception a reliable way to watch free TV, and today it serves around a million UK homes. It’s run by Everyone TV, the same organisation behind Freeview and Freely.
The catch is that Freesat doesn’t have its own satellites. It uses the same SES satellites as Sky, and Sky’s millions of satellite customers make up the bulk of that audience.
That dependence has worried broadcasters and regulators for years. Ofcom’s 2024 report on the future of TV, and the BBC’s response to it, warned that if Sky left satellite, it could challenge the viability of the Freesat platform.
SES, they suggested, might conclude it wasn’t worth running a satellite service just for the public service broadcasters and Freesat.
The BBC also estimated that by 2030, the cost per viewer hour of satellite broadcasting would be around five times higher than in 2023/24, as linear viewing shrinks.
As long as Sky remains on those satellites, that scenario is on hold. Before today, 2029 was the date hanging over Freesat’s head. Now, Sky is committed to satellite into the next decade, whatever that turns out to mean.
It also caps off a better year for Freesat than seemed likely back in the spring. The Freesat 4K recorders were discontinued earlier this year, leaving fans with nowhere to buy a new recording box – until Manhattan’s S4-R Freesat recorder went on sale in May.
If you’ve been weighing up a new Freesat recorder, today’s news makes that purchase feel like a little less of a gamble than it did yesterday.
Freesat Isn’t Out Of The Woods
This is an agreement between Sky and SES, about Sky’s services. It doesn’t mention Freesat at all, and it doesn’t settle how much longer the BBC and the other public service broadcasters are willing to pay for satellite distribution, a cost that looks like worse value with every year that fewer people watch live TV.
Sky’s own interests lie elsewhere, too. Earlier this year, a Sky-backed study argued that Freeview and Freesat could be switched off by 2034, and Sky’s own future is clearly built around Sky Stream and Glass.
Whatever Freesat gains from today’s news, Sky is keeping its satellite running for its own customers.
And then there’s the government. In June, it published a green paper setting out two possible dates for switching off Freeview (December 31, 2034, or December 31, 2044) and said there was “a compelling case” for the earlier one.
Freesat, though, was pushed off to a separate “transition plan” to be drawn up later, leaving satellite viewers with even less clarity than aerial users.
The government’s final decision is due in a white paper later this year, which hasn’t been published yet.
The long-term replacement for Freesat is supposed to be Freely, which delivers live channels over broadband instead. But Freely needs a decent broadband connection, which isn’t a given for the many Freesat users in rural areas with patchy broadband.
So this deal doesn’t decide Freesat’s future. The broadcasters and the government will have far more say in that, and so will how quickly Freely catches on.
But without Sky’s continued commitment to these satellites, Freesat would be in a lot more trouble than it is today. For now, the dish on your wall has a few more years of work ahead of it – even if nobody’s saying exactly how many.
For more news about Sky, Freesat and the future of TV, Subscribe to our free newsletter.
Thanks for this excellent comprehensive article, and “Yay!! Sky Q satellite will continue into the 2030s”. This is brilliant news; the Sky Q interface is so much more responsive than broadband, and the playback set-up has fantastic functionality just no where to be seen with the rather clunky Sky Glass/Stream. This is particularly noticeable with live sport, where Sky Q has superb flexibility with re-wind and easy access to “time markers”, etc. As for the Sky Q recording to hard drive facility, this puts it in Utopia as far as watching TV is concerned.