Sky Stream and Sky Glass are getting something Sky spent five years telling us we didn’t need: a Record button.
Sky is currently testing Sky OS 2.0, the next big version of the software that runs its streaming TV and box, and its biggest change is a dedicated Recordings section.
Press Record on a programme, or Record Series on a show, and it gets saved to Sky’s cloud for you to watch later, with up to 1,000 hours of space per home.
It’s been in a beta trial with a group of Glass and Stream customers since mid-September, and Sky says it’s pretty confident it will be ready for everyone before the end of the year.
I got a closer look at the new software at a briefing at Sky this week. Recording is the headline, but it’s far from the only change.
There’s a new navigation bar along the top of the screen, a refreshed TV Guide, an AI upgrade to voice search that can handle follow-up questions, and a dedicated home for sport.
Recording also comes with some real limits, including channels you can’t record from at all, starting with the BBC. Here’s what’s new, what’s still missing, and why it matters even if you’re not a Sky customer.
A Quick Reminder: Sky Stream, Sky Glass And Sky Q
For anyone who hasn’t followed Sky’s journey over the past few years, Sky now has two very different ways of getting its TV into your home.
Sky Q is the traditional route: a satellite dish on your wall and a box under your TV with its own hard drive, which records programmes and keeps them until you delete them.
Sky Glass (a TV with Sky built in, launched in 2021) and Sky Stream (a small box that plugs into any TV, launched in October 2022) do things differently. There’s no dish and no hard drive – everything, including live channels, comes over your broadband. Both run the same software, Sky OS.
The streaming products are very clearly Sky’s future. In December 2025, Sky Q disappeared from Sky’s website, and new customers can now only get it by phone or in a shop.
But millions of homes still have it. And when we’ve asked readers why they haven’t moved to Stream, one answer comes up again and again: recording.
Recording On Sky Stream Today: The Playlist Puzzle
Until now, Sky Glass and Sky Stream have never had a Record button. Instead, they had the Playlist.
See something you want to watch later, press “+” on the remote, and the show goes into your Playlist. Simple enough on the surface. Behind the scenes, though, one of three very different things could happen, and you weren’t told which.
Some programmes, mostly from Sky’s own channels and sport, were quietly recorded to Sky’s cloud. Others, including everything from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5, were simply a shortcut that opened the broadcaster’s own app – so your “recording” was only there for as long as iPlayer or ITVX kept the programme available. And some channels couldn’t be saved at all.
As I wrote back in our Sky Stream recording explainer, using it was sometimes a game of trial and error. I’ve used Glass and Stream for years and write about this stuff day and night, and even I’ve never been able to answer one simple question with confidence: which shows actually get recorded, and which don’t?
That was largely by design. Sky’s view was that you shouldn’t need to know.
When I asked about recording at the Sky Glass Gen 2 launch in February 2025, Fraser Stirling, Sky’s Global Chief Product Officer, said Sky believed in the Playlist even more than when Glass first launched.
“Customers don’t care what happens behind the scenes,” he told me. “They just want to know that if they press Plus on their remote, the show will be there to watch.”
Twenty months later, Sky is putting a Record button on the screen.
What’s New: My Library And A Real Record Button
At the briefing, Sky said one of its aims with Sky OS 2.0 is to give customers more control over how they save content – and, with an eye on those coming from Sky Q, to offer “the best of both worlds”.
“We’ve learned that people want more control,” Sky told us.
The Playlist name is gone. In its place is My Library, one of the main sections on the new navigation bar. It brings together two separate things:
- My Watchlist, which is more or less the old Playlist, and works the same way. Everything you’d already added should move across.
- Recordings, which is new, and comes with its own Manage Recordings screen.
According to Sky, My Library can also hold the sports teams and actors you follow.
When you select a programme, the “+” button now opens a sidebar with separate options. In the demo, choosing an episode of The White Lotus in the TV Guide brought up four of them: Record, Record Series, Save to Watchlist, and Set a Reminder.
That split is the whole point. Sky says people told it they sometimes don’t want everything from a show or a sport. They want one particular match or episode, so they want to record just that one thing.
A few details worth knowing:
- 1,000 hours per home. Each customer gets 1,000 hours of recording space. Profiles still work, and each profile has its own recordings, but the 1,000 hours are shared across all of them.
- When you run out of space, you can delete recordings yourself, or let Sky automatically remove older recordings you’ve already watched – similar to how Sky Q handles a full hard drive.
- Recordings are only kept for one year.
- It’s all in the cloud. Nothing is stored on your Glass or Stream. Sky explained that it doesn’t record the same programme over and over again for each customer: when someone chooses to record something, it’s recorded once in the cloud, and everyone who recorded it watches from that same copy.
- Sky Go plays along, partly. The new Sky Go app for Glass and Stream customers, launched last month, lets you set recordings from your phone. You can’t watch those recordings in the app yet, though – they’re for the TV only, for now.
The Catches
So far, so Sky Q. But this is where the cloud starts to show its limits.
You can’t record everything
This is the biggest one. Not every channel offers the Record option.
At the moment, according to Sky, that means Sky’s own channels (and even there, the odd programme may not be recordable because of rights issues), the sports channels, and some others.
Looking through the new Sky Go app, I can see the option on MTV, Comedy Central, TLC, the U channels, and 5’s channels, among others.
What you can’t record, for example, is anything on the BBC’s channels.
Beta testers on Sky’s community forum also report that they can’t record ITV. Channel 4 is less clear: one or two report being able to record it, while others don’t get the option at all, and one tester said Channel 4 recordings they’d set simply never appeared.
For anything you can’t record, you’re back to the old Playlist approach: save it to your Watchlist, and it’ll open in iPlayer, ITVX or the relevant app when you want to watch it – if it’s still available there.
One year, then it’s gone
Sky Q recordings stay on your box until you delete them (or the box dies). The new cloud recordings are kept for a year.
For most people, most of the time, that’s plenty. But if you’re the kind of viewer who keeps a favourite film or a Christmas special for years, it’s a meaningful difference.
There’s also the question of rights. The recording lives on Sky’s servers, not your box, so what happens if Sky loses the rights to a show you’ve recorded?
Sky didn’t really answer that one at the briefing. We’ve seen titles vanish from streaming libraries plenty of times when a licence runs out, and back in 2023, I warned that the same could apply to Sky’s cloud recordings. For now, it remains an open question.
Fast forward, but no skipping
Beta testers on Sky’s community forum say you can fast-forward through adverts in a recording, but not skip them.
That’s different from Sky’s own on-demand shows, where paying for the £5/month ad skipping add-on gets you a one-press Skip Ads button. One tester compared the two versions of the same programme: on the recording, they had to fast-forward through the breaks, while the on-demand version let them skip.
Others say fast-forwarding through recordings is a bit sluggish and buggy at the moment, stopping and starting so it takes longer than it should to get past the adverts. That’s the sort of thing a beta is for, and it may well be fixed by launch.
Record or Watchlist? Good luck
And then there’s the confusion.
Say you want to catch Saturday Night Live later. Do you save it to your Watchlist? Do you record it? Which is better? And on a channel that doesn’t support recording, the option simply isn’t there – so sometimes you’ll get the choice and sometimes you won’t.
Sky’s community forum suggests some testers are already unsure about the difference between Record and Save to Watchlist – and those are people who SIGNED UP for a trial.
Sky told me that’s exactly what the trial is for: it will see how people deal with the change, and may add better explanations, or a better way to choose, before launch.
It might yet be a case of “be careful what you wish for”. After years of the Playlist hiding what was going on, we now get the choice – and with it, the job of understanding which option does what, on which channel.
Why Is Sky Doing This?
Sky hasn’t said so directly, but it’s not hard to see who this is aimed at.
Just this week, Sky extended its satellite deal with SES “into the next decade”, without naming an end date. That keeps Sky Q going for now.
But Sky can’t keep paying for satellites forever, and at some point, the people still holding on to their Sky Q boxes will need to be moved onto streaming.
Many of them, especially older viewers, still swear by recording. Recording might be the nudge that finally gets them to switch.
It’s also an unexpected move, given where the rest of the industry is heading.
Freely, the streaming service from the people behind Freeview, has no recording at all – not on a hard drive, not in the cloud. When Freely launched, Everyone TV’s Carl Pfeiffer told me it was unlikely ever to add it, as people are shifting towards streaming.
The only Freely box that records anything, the Humax Aura EZ, can only do it from an aerial.
Virgin Media now gives new customers its Stream box by default, which can’t record. And just last month, EE’s new cheapest TV package came with a box that can’t record either.
We’ve been pointing at Freely, at Virgin Media’s Stream box, and at Sky Stream and its Playlist, and saying the same thing for years: the future of TV doesn’t include recording.
Now, Sky is offering at least a bridge – a bit of proper recording for the people who want it, on a platform with no hard drive at all.
And it goes to show that “never” is a risky word in this business. Freely has no plans to add recording. Then again, few of us expected Sky Stream to get a Record button either.
Hands-On: The Rest Of Sky OS 2.0
Recording is the headline for our readers, but it’s not the only change. Sky OS 2.0 has a new look, too, and at the briefing, I got to see much of it.
A navigation bar at the top
The most obvious change is a new navigation bar running along the top of the screen. From left to right: Recents, Home, TV Guide, My Library, Sport, My Account, then Search and Settings.
This has become something of a running joke with streaming services. Every few years, Netflix, Disney+ and the rest give their interface an overhaul and move the menu from the top to the side – and a couple of years later, they move it back again.
When Sky’s NOW was redesigned last year, its menu went the other way, from the top to the left. So Sky now has a top navigation bar, which means it can move it to the side in a few years’ time.
Joking aside, it does make things quicker to reach, and it looks very similar to the navigation bar in the new Sky Go app, so moving between the two feels more familiar.
Recents, on the far left, is new. It shows the apps, channels and programmes you’ve used recently, so you can jump straight back in.
A home screen with live TV – whether you like it or not
The Home screen is what Glass and Stream users are used to, but with bigger preview windows for shows.
The big change: when you turn on the TV, live TV from the last channel you watched starts playing automatically in the first tile.
Personally, I’m not a fan. You switch on the telly, and before you’ve even decided what to watch, there’s noise and mayhem coming from whatever you left on last night.
Sky says it’s something live TV fans like – they want to see live TV the moment they switch on. One tester on the forum mentions a new setting to display live TV on startup, so there may be a way to turn this off. Here’s hoping.
A refreshed TV Guide
The TV Guide is now always one click away on the navigation bar, and it’s had a makeover. Channels are now shown by their logos rather than their names, which makes the guide easier to scan, and there are tabs along the top to filter by category – TV shows, movies, sport, news and so on.
You can also browse up to seven days ahead with a new Day Picker, and type in a channel number to jump straight to it.
When you’re watching live TV, there’s also a newly designed mini guide, which slides in over the programme with channel logos, what’s on, how far into the programme you are, and what’s on next.
Sport gets its own home
Sport now has its own section on the navigation bar, with live events, what’s coming up, highlights, analysis and stats in one place.
You can also add your team and follow it, so everything available to watch involving that team is gathered together. It builds on the Sports Hub and Multiview features Sky added in August.
Smart Voice: an AI upgrade
Sky’s voice search is also getting an AI upgrade, which Sky calls Smart Voice.
It now understands more complex, conversational questions, including follow-ups. You can ask “What time is The Traitors on this week?” and get an actual answer, rather than a list of search results.
Other examples include asking for a quick summary of a show, describing one you can’t remember the name of, or asking for something to watch next after finishing a series.
There are guardrails in place, so it will only answer questions about relevant topics like TV and films. Don’t expect it to help with your homework.
As before, you hold the Voice button on the remote to use it. Sky Glass can also listen hands-free when you say “Hello Sky”.
Not For Sky Q
One last thing – Sky OS 2.0 is for Sky Glass and Sky Stream only. Sky Q runs on different software, and it isn’t part of the trial.
That fits a pattern we keep seeing: Sky Q still gets the occasional new feature, but the big upgrades go to Glass and Stream first.
Bottom Line: A Gift, Even If It’s Not Perfect
So, am I being too picky?
For years, we’ve been told that recording belongs to the past, and that the streaming future simply doesn’t include it. Sky Stream and Sky Glass were part of that story.
Now, Sky is giving its streaming customers a proper Record button, a place to manage what they’ve saved, and 1,000 hours to fill.
Yes, it only works on some channels. Yes, recordings expire after a year. Yes, you’ll have to “manually” fast-forward through the adverts, and yes, choosing between Record and Watchlist may confuse plenty of people at first.
But we didn’t expect to see recording on these devices again – and here it is, even if it’s not perfect.
It’s also worth remembering that this is still a beta. Sky says the features and design may change before the wider launch, and some things may still be added.
We haven’t seen exactly how recording will work once it reaches everyone, so I’ll save the full verdict for when I can test it properly.
So yes, surprisingly – recording is making a comeback. In 2026.
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