Price

Sky Glass Air goes on sale June 10^th and it’ll be available to purchase from Sky as well as Currys (from the 18^th June onwards).

Prices for the TV (on its own) start as low as £6/month for the smallest screen. Add a TV package – say Sky Essential TV – and you’ll be looking at £21/month as the cheapest option.

For the medium sized screen it’s £10/month, and for the largest set it’s £13/month.

You can choose to pay over the course of a 24-month contract or in rolling 31-day contracts.

Design

• Easy assembly
• Central pedestal
• Three sizes available

Like Sky Glass, Sky Glass Air comes in 43-, 55-, and 65-inch sizes. I was hoping it’d come in a wider range of sizes but Sky has stuck to the same approach as its previous TVs. I think that’s a missed opportunity.

Regardless, the look of this model differs from the behemoth that Sky Glass Gen 2 is. It’s slimmer, less imposing, though it carries the same overall silhouette from Sky Glass.

It sits on a central pedestal stand which doesn’t lift the TV off the ground – not great if you want to integrate a soundbar if the TV is perched on a table. Sky’s reasoning is that it believes a) having the TV down low improves the audio performance and that b) some will prefer to wall-mount, in which case a soundbar would be attached to the wall.

I’d prefer having space for a sound system but Sky knows it’s customers better than I do.

Sky says the TV requires no tools to assemble it as, like Sky Glass 2, it needs to be plonked onto the stand which slots. I hope it’s an easier process than on the Gen 2 Glass – I had to turn the TV upside down to figure out how the stand slotted in.

For wall-mounting Glass Air supports Sky’s wall-mounts and universal models too. Power and mute buttons on located on side of the TV in case you lose the remote.

Colours come in the choice of Sea Green, Carbon Grey, and Cotton White with a colour-matching remote to go with it. It’s the same remote that comes with Sky Glass and Stream, which it’s not unsurprising, but I was hoping with Sky’s second gen models (and its environmental focus) that it would have ditched batteries for USB-C charging as other TV brands have.

User Experience

• Sky OS
• More rails of content

From the looks of it Sky OS hasn’t changed much but Sky mentioned it was placing a greater emphasis on personalisation, adding more rails to extend the viewing options, as well as tapping more into a viewer’s watch history to influence what shows up on screen.

30 more rails have been added to the home screen which are constantly being updated to offer fresh programming. I’ve liked Sky OS since it launched. It’s non-partisan approach to aggregating content has been one of its strong points but the addition of 30 more rails did give me pause.

Much like Netflix or Amazon’s Fire TV, too much choice might result in ‘death scrolling’ where you have so many more options that you don’t find something to watch in a sea of content. It’ll be interesting to see how Sky handle this potential issue.

Otherwise the interface seemed nippy, with an interface identical to what’s on Sky Glass and Stream. It’s not the same as Sky Q though, which lives in its own little area of the Sky ecosystem.

Gaming

• 60Hz screen
• ALLM support
• No Sky Live compatibility

Glass Air is light on features as far as gaming goes. It’s a 60Hz panel so 4K/120Hz, VRR, Dolby Vision Gaming – none of those features would make much sense on Sky Glass Air, even though Sky alluded to games consoles being one of the sources its customers plug into its TVs.

Having ALLM automatically puts the TV into its lowest-latency state when it detects a gaming signal. I understand the simplicity Sky is going for with its TVs, but I’d have liked an actual game mode you can manually choose through the remote.

Sky Live is not compatible with this model, so that built-in gaming component that Sky Glass supports isn’t available here.

Features

• Three HDMI inputs
• Dolby Vision HDR
• Dolby Audio

There’s three HDMI inputs – the same as on Sky Glass Gen 2 – which I think is fine for a TV at this price point. There’s a HDMI eARC input to connect an external sound system, two USB inputs (USB-C and USB-A), plus an Ethernet port for a hardwired connection.

It’s Wi-Fi 6 compatible and supports Bluetooth 5 Low Energy and Apple AirPlay 2. DTT DBV-T/T2 antennae is provided as a backup to the Wi-Fi not working.

HDR support includes HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision with no HDR10+. Sky Glass Air supports Dolby Atmos but not through its 30W downfiring sound system (just Dolby Audio).

To get Atmos sound through Sky and its various apps, you’ll need to connect a Dolby Atmos soundbar. The design choice Sky has made doesn’t make that too easy, however.

Performance

• Brighter, sharper picture
• More dimming zones
• Clearer sound quality

There wasn’t much time to get into the nitty gritty of the Sky Glass Air’s performance but in terms of the clips I saw, Sky Glass Air delivered a bright, clear, and detailed picture that made a positive impression.

A short clip from Last of Us season 2 didn’t present any anomalies and looked reasonably close to what I’d expect from Sky Glass Gen 2. Another clip of a football match showed the TV’s contrast looked pretty solid too.

Vivid mode made an appearance and while it produced an uptick in the brightness and punchiness of some colours, I wouldn’t describe the difference between it from the TV’s movie mode as being big. Granted this TV will have a lower ceiling in terms of brightness than Gen 2, but for a TV that’s aiming around the £500 mark, it did look very good.

Sky Glass Air sports a Quantum Dot filter (let’s just call it QLED) with a global dimming backlight to control brightness, contrast and black levels. What I didn’t get a chance to look as it’s black level performance with the clips shown.

There wasn’t too much time with audio either but the stereo 2.0 system sounded fine. Audio was spacious and matched its position on the screen but from the few clips I saw, bass was lacking, sounding thin and flat in places. Voices are clear but they’re not boosted forward from the TV.

I’m sure there are sound modes that bring dialogue higher up in the mix but my first thoughts was that this may need a soundbar to bring it to life. I’ve always wondered why Sky didn’t follow up the soundbar it partnered with Devialet on many moons ago. Now would seem like a decent time to introduce a (slimmer) sequel.

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