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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You’re watching it … running the AppleTV+ app on your Samsung tv…
Did I get that correct?
That’s too bad, I’m sorry you’re having a bad experience… not like I’m a programmer on it or anything…
I’ve never had any problems but I run it from an AppleTV device So I’m thinking that my sample of 1 means nothing
Sorry for the bother
Yes, I’m running Apple TV app on a pretty new Samsung TV. I don’t know if that is AppleTV+, and I know there is hardware called Apple TV, but we’ve just got an app that shows the apple logo with TV after it. Its confusing.
Thanks for responding. It seems like something is really wrong but there is no way to fix it.
God I wish Apple would’ve named the box and the streaming service significantly different. A lot of people call AppleTV+ “AppleTV”… which is a very different product.
This sounds to me like an issue with the TV. I suspect that the CPU on there just can’t handle the app, for some reason. We’ve got it running on an actual AppleTV box, a Sony TV with Android, and an LG TV running webOS with no issues at all, much less the issues you’ve described. The type of things you’re describing sound similar to what we experienced with an old Roku TV after a few of the apps on it were updated. We’d have random freezes, audio lag, and the loss of timestamp constantly - the whole nine yards. I’d try a TV stick or an actual AppleTV. You’ll probably have a much better experience and the content is well worth it.
TV Apps are so stupid. Two of our TVs can’t watch some Netflix movies either (Bandersnatch or whatever being on of them) because they’re “too old” despite only being a year or two old and despite being released and purchased after these movies/episodes were released. No one in their right mind wants to buy an entirely new TV because some dumb app stops working. What an inane and idiotic idea.
What’s up Blue Steel (Zoolander reference for anyone who doesn’t get it)! Thanks for replying. I expected that something was really off with my experience.
I’d normally agree that the TV is probably the issue, but the thing is every other service we use on it works fine, or at least at an acceptable or minimum expected level. This includes Netflix (Bandersnatch included), Hulu, Amazon Prime Video (some dumb CC language setting issues though), Tubi, Pluto, Twitch, Plex, Sling, Peacock, Vudu, Disney+, Crackle, freevee, YouTube (too many ads yuk), Fubo, RokuTV.
I don’t want to rag on AppleTV so much, but it’s grossly incompetent amongst its “competition” on my relatively new TV. Maybe the content is worth it, but the app sure doesn’t make engagement happen in my house.
Sorry. I realize I’m mostly venting my frustrations and there isn’t a real answer for my issues. FWIW I’ve been struggling my way through an Apple show (Invasion) the last few days and I’m more excited to be done with using AppleTV than what happens in the show and that saddens me.
I suspect the problem comes from running the Apple TV+ service on your Samsung TV’s built-in OS.
I say this because I use the Apple TV+ service on the Apple TV device (on a 2019 TCL TV), and I have none of the issues you described. It remembers exactly where I left off with multiple shows/movies. The AV is always perfectly synced. Subtitles appear when I want them, and not when I don’t.
Sounds like classic apple. Buy all our overpriced devices and it’ll “just work”, otherwise go fuck yourself.
Actually, I think they only do that to you. They just don’t like you, specifically, and want you to go fuck yourself. It’s fine for everyone else and they send us free stuff too.
I used Apple TV+ on my Roku for years before getting my Apple TV box.
It’s most likely an issue with the TV. Samsung is trash for supporting their TV OS.
I don’t have any of the issues you have had on my Hisense TV with built in Roku.
I’d normally agree and blame the TV. I didn’t pick this TV, but compared to the ShitBox we had before it’s been surprisingly good.
I’m no fan of smart TVs in general, and I expect their life is limited. My TV is as new as the latest game consoles, but admittedly without the same level of update support. Regardless, every other streaming app we use doesn’t have anywhere near the fundamental issues that we’re having with the AppleTV app.
Ok. But it’s not an issue with the app itself. It’s an issue with the app on your TV. It doesn’t have that issue on other Android based smart TVs or tv boxes.
I personally never have had a positive experience with using a smart tv. I connect a Roku or apple tv box to them and never setup the smart tv stuff.
Lately we have been having an issue where the most recent episode we watched is played instead of the new episode, i thought that it was just my wife because she does that on other streaming services too.
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.
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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.
