I’m not complaining about the content, I’m upset with the experience. It has the worst user experience I’ve ever used with a streaming service, and I have Hulu with ads. FWIW we’re watching on a Samsung TV that’s a couple years old.

My wife and I have had Apple TV off and on since it came out and we always quit watching it and cancel. It’s a bad, frustrating chore to use so we avoid it. This time we got it because it’s included with our new phone plan, but we quickly remembered why we don’t watch anything on it.

Apple TV doesn’t remember where we were in an episode. If we stop watching and come back to the episode it starts from the beginning. If we pause the video and wait too long it jumps back to the menu and we lose where we were. If we stop watching at any point, hopefully we remember where we were when we start watching again because we have to fast forward to it.

If we pause the video too many times it becomes unwatchable. It plays back in this amazingly weird jump back, jump forward, playback of stuttering weirdness. So if we pause but don’t want to let it pause too long we unpause and pause again so we can keep our place. But the only real option is to pause and note the time so we can start the episode over and fast forward back to where we were.

Apple TV can’t even remember what episode we are on, continually jumping back to an early season episode even though we are on season 2 or 3. Say we just finished episode 8 of season 3 and credits are rolling, we press the back button to go to the episode selection (it doesn’t have a next episode option, which seems weird) and it jumps all the way left back to e1s1. So to get to the next episode we have to move the selector right dozens of times to the next episode to start it. If we come back the next day the show is listed in our “continue watching” as e1s1. We can tell it we’ve watched that episode by long button press then ‘Mark Episode as Watched’, but who wants to do that after every episode?

The audio drifts, often off by seconds ahead of the video. We hear sound effects before they happen, talking is weird, etc. CC text appears and disappears before we see them talk. This might get fixed if we stop playing the episode, and restart it and then fast forward to where we were, but often we just deal with it because of the hassle. Imagine watching Ted Lasso and you hear the goal happen 2 seconds before the video. Super cool.

We want closed captions on, and it says it’s on, but they aren’t. We have to go into the menu which says CC is on but change it to something else then back to get them to show up. Amazon Prime video has a similar bug but it still shows CC but in the wrong language sometimes.

Watching anything on Apple TV is a chore and annoying and I would never pay for this “service”.

Is this the actual user experience Apple designed? I get that they are a walled garden with the “best experience” on Apple devices, but this is horrible and would never make me consider Apple devices as a good thing.

Oh, and I’ve searched for solutions but they are crazy. Why would I need to go to iTunes on a different device to change settings, to log out and back in etc? We don’t have any Apple devices associated with this account, so apparently a fix isn’t possible? 3rd party device problem they say. Call Apple support? Why? We have 10 other streaming apps that work without these horrible issues. We’ve uninstalled and reinstalled the app, logged out and in, but it just works the same way as I’ve described. It seems to be designed this way.

This is the user experience they give people. No wonder they need to pump their subscription numbers with free offers.

  • Newtra
    31·
    11 months ago

    It’s not you. The experience on computer also sucks. I haven’t had those video playback & CC issues, but the interface is awful:

    • There are so many ads for other shows it’s infuriating. I don’t care they’re on the same service. They’re ads on a premium product and should be optional.
    • On one of the shows I was watching the time code for automatically skipping the credits were out of sync, causing the episodes to cut out while there was still more than a minute left if I didn’t intervene in time. If I did intervene in time, it was unreasonably hard to get to the next episode, having to go back to the front page, select the show again and scroll along the episode list. There’s no prev/next episode buttons, no way to return directly to the episode list.
    • Entering the site from the wrong language URL puts you in a broken login state where you can get to a show but it will error before playing. This happens all the time if I enter the US site recommended by Google instead of the German site (I’m in Germany but my browser is in English). I lost about an hour of my life trying to figure it out.
    • The vignette effect when you pause/move the mouse is so strong it’s hard to see the content/subtitles behind it. Annoying if you like to gawk at background detail.
    • On PC it also forgets where you are all the time. The URL doesn’t change for the show you’re watching, so if you close and reopen a browser with a paused video it boots you back to the front page.

    Also, the desktop app on macOS is unusable for me without playback speed controls. At least I can hack them in with userscripts on browser.

    It hurts me, but I gave up and went back to piracy. I really like Foundation and want to financially support it, but I was taking psychic damage every time I tried to watch it through Apple TV. If I kept paying Apple TV without watching it there, they wouldn’t know I was subscribing for Foundation so my money wouldn’t be going to the right place.

      • Newtra
        2·
        11 months ago

        I’ve had those “some little wrinkle and the whole thing falls apart” moments. The worst thing is googling them and finding huge threads of complaints from years ago. Apple is a powerhouse at building high quality new software, but they never listen to user feedback and fix the old stuff. Sometimes things even gets worse! e.g. the AirPods Gen 1 let you change the double-tap action between Next Track, Previous Track, Play/Pause and Siri. Obviously people have asked for more customization options like Rewind 5s. Of course, AirPods Pro Gen 2 removed options and now you can only choose between Noise Cancellation and Siri. At this rate the next gen will remove touch controls completely and force me to talk Siri 😱.

        The TV might be the problem if Samsung cheaped out on the CPU, or has too much bloatware running in the background. It’s infeasible for app makers to test on every TV model and every OS update. It’s easy to see how an update could cause a new type of system lag that hadn’t appeared during testing… That said, I remember Apple TV also didn’t have good options for selecting quality. It’s also pretty plausible that Apple didn’t code it to fall back to a lower quality if the CPU couldn’t keep up.