Sky Go

I have been getting HD on some of the channels but since yesterday its now switched to non HD channels, is there any way to get back the HD channels or is this controlled by some other factor?

I thought Sky Go and NOW TV use adaptive bitrate streaming in the first place?

I've never had anything in HD on Sky Go. And now it turns out it doesn't work in Firefox 52 (or Edge for that matter). Chrome hasn't been supported for a while so now the only solution for watching anything through is through the big blue E, or IE11. Must be a Silverlight issue?

Correct about the Silverlight. I dont understand why there just dont update it. There is deffo HD channels on SKY Go, I have no idea how there appear.

The only channels I've seen in HD on Sky Go are those that carry sport programming (Sky Sports, ITV4, etc). The rest all seem to still be SD/low bitrate 720. As said Sky Go does use adaptive streaming, so you won't see the HD streams if it decides your connection can't stably stream it.

On the Silverlight note, since Firefox dropped Silverlight support a few weeks back they've added a notice for Windows Firefox visitors saying that they are working on a fix instead of their old stance of 'use this browser'. On Mac's it changed to use the Sky Go download player app to play streams about the same time, which is essentially a HTML5 player wrapped as an Electron app.

To me that would suggest that visitors on Windows will at some point be changed to either the same app, or the HTML player directly on the site. The player is functional but a quite buggy at the moment which might be why they've not changed Windows visitors yet.

Hmm, I understand Silverlight seems to have been out of active development for the last five years or so, so that entire Sky Go platform (for PC at least) seems to be built around an obsolete technology picked for its DRM capabilities that now only works in one browser under Windows 10.

I presume the next logical step is what YouTube have done and use HTML 5 as a player as that'll work in any (modern) browser but I suppose it'll be a logistical nightmare to port it over.

Checking Sky Store, it appears that that service has already changed to HTML5 using a PC with the Chrome browser and is a low bitrate 720p, so I'd assume it'll be rolled out to Sky Go and NOW TV later this year.

The last time I used Sky Store, it was still using Silverlight.

The real challenge is support for the DRM protection in browsers, there's no single standard so different browsers/devices require streams encrypted with different DRM software. The PlayReady DRM currently used by Sky Go is only supported by Edge/Internet Explorer.


Netflix and Amazon get around this encrypting their streams in a number of DRM schemes which cover most browsers/devices, which is trivial for them as all their content is on demand. Sky Go has live streams which significantly complicate it.

Firefox recently added support for the Widevine DRM that Chrome/Android use, which simplifies things a bit, but Edge, Safari, iOS and games consoles still require other DRM schemes. To hit most devices, you basically need to encrypt all the streams in Widevine, PlayReady and Apple's FairPlay.

I imagine this is the main reason Sky have stuck with Silverlight for so long, as until fairly recently support has been hit and miss (and is still problematic). Amazon and Netflix were Chrome only for their HTML players until not long ago. The appearance of streaming via the download player on Mac's would suggest that this is the problem for Sky, as using an Electron app allows them to migrate to Widevine and stick with just that without having to worry about different DRM for different browsers.