If you’ve settled in to watch something on ITVX through your Sky Stream or Sky Glass over the past few days, the app may have done you a strange favour: skipped straight to the ending, so you don’t have to wait around to find out what happens.
Helpful! Except, of course, nobody asked it to.
A growing number of Sky customers are reporting that ITVX on Sky Stream and Glass keeps jumping out of programmes – usually straight to the end credits, sometimes back to the very start, and occasionally to somewhere random in the middle.
The show then gets marked as “watched”, which is a tidy way of being told you’ve finished something you never actually got to see.
And the timing could hardly be worse. The Britain’s Got Talent final airs tonight (Saturday, May 30), and if you’re planning to catch up on demand rather than watch live, ITVX on your Sky box might cheerfully fling you forward to the moment the winner is announced.
So if you’re reading this over the weekend – or even on Monday – tread carefully.
It’s a funny bug on paper. It’s a lot less funny when it’s the third time you’ve tried to watch tonight’s soap and ITVX has shown you the closing titles before the opening ones.
A Sky Stream And Glass Reminder
For anyone who hasn’t used them: Sky Stream and Sky Glass are Sky’s broadband-based TV products. Neither needs a satellite dish – everything, including the live channels, is streamed over your internet connection.
Sky Glass is the all-in-one 4K television with a built-in soundbar, while Sky Stream is the small puck-style box you plug into a TV you already own.
Both run Sky’s Entertainment OS, which pulls Sky’s own channels, the major streaming apps, and the British broadcaster apps – ITVX included – into one interface.
That last detail matters here, because this bug sits squarely with the ITVX app on those two devices. It doesn’t appear to be a wider ITVX outage affecting everyone everywhere.
What’s Actually Going Wrong
The first complaint I can find on Sky’s community forum was posted on May 27, though it may well have started a little earlier. Either way, several days in, there’s still no fix.
The trigger seems to be linked – at least partly – to fast-forwarding through adverts. ITVX is free and ad-funded, and it has its own Premium ad-free tier – but Sky’s paid ad-skipping add-on lets Stream and Glass users fast-forward ITVX ad breaks.
A number of people report that the jump happens right after they’ve skipped the adverts, sending them either to the end of the episode or back to the beginning.
I tested it on my own Sky Stream with an episode of Emmerdale (the things I do for this job). I fast-forwarded the ads at the start, but then the episode began playing perfectly normally.
About 20 seconds in, with no further input from me, it suddenly jumped straight to the end credits. What that tells us about the actual cause… honestly, who knows.
But it does suggest this is more than a simple “don’t touch the fast-forward button” problem.
What Other Users Are Seeing
Of course, I’m not the only one. One forum user described it like this: “This is happening on Sky Stream, making ITVX effectively unusable. I have had sudden jumps to the end, jumps back to the start, and last night’s Coronation St jumped to the halfway point as soon as the titles finished.”
Photo: ITV
Another wrote: “Been like this for 3 days now, tried all the usual ‘fixes’ but nothing works. As soon as a program starts on ITVX, it jumps right to the end and then starts playing something else that we’re really not interested in.”
So it’s not only the spoiler problem – in some cases, the app then rolls you straight on into something else entirely, which is its own special kind of irritating.
What Sky Has Said
Sky has acknowledged the issue. An official Sky representative on the forum said: “We can understand how frustrating this must be and have escalated the problem to our support teams. They will work with ITV to fix the issue. As soon as I have more information, I’ll update everyone.”
That points to this being something Sky and ITV need to sort out between them, rather than a quick setting you can change at home.
One word of warning: at least one user who phoned Sky about this was told to… check his Wi-Fi.
As we’ve seen with past Sky bugs, “have you checked your broadband?” tends to be the opening line before a known issue gets acknowledged – so for now at least, calling up probably isn’t worth your time.
Is There A Workaround?
Not a proper fix, but a couple of things might help in the meantime.
Some users reckon the episodes stopped jumping when they didn’t fast-forward the adverts. So if you’re happy to sit through the ad breaks the old-fashioned way, that may keep ITVX behaving – at least until Sky and ITV push out a fix.
Hardly ideal when you’re paying for the privilege of skipping them, but there it is. And it may not even help – but you’re welcome to try.
The other option is to watch ITVX on a different device altogether. Because this seems contained to the ITVX app on Stream and Glass, you can sign into the same ITVX account on, say, your smart TV’s own ITVX app and watch there without the jumping.
The catch is that Sky’s ad-skipping doesn’t come with you, so you’ll be sitting through the adverts on that device regardless.
Sky Devices And Their Bug History
Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen strange bugs plague streaming devices.
The closest cousin to this one was the Channel 4 app glitch in early 2024, where Sky Glass TVs would suddenly blast out random Channel 4 audio while sitting in standby – the Taskmaster theme tune drifting out of a switched-off telly in the dead of night.
There have been others, too: Sky Q’s long-running Netflix “red spinning circle” that left the app unusable for weeks in 2024, and the Sky Glass black-screen-with-sound bug that hit both Gen 1 and Gen 2 sets last year.
None of this is to pile on – bugs happen to every platform – but it’s worth noting when the whole pitch for Stream and Glass is that everything just works, in one place, without any fuss.
We’ll keep an eye on this and update once Sky and ITV have more to say. To stay in the loop, Subscribe to our free newsletter.
