The Apple TV experience sucks. Is it me?
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.
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