I enjoy having access to Apple TV+, but there does seem to be something of a difficulty in trying to navigate beyond obstacles in order to move forward when watching a television series. I’ve just been enjoying Manhunt, the story of John Wilkes Booth and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. I’ve been travelling around a bit and watching the series in various locations, one of them being in BC Canada. I actually used a dedicated Apple TV with an Apple remote in that house and it was easy to move around the series. Now that I’m back in Australia . I can watch the same series from a streaming app on my television set, but I can’t freely move forward from episode to episode in the way that I can with other streaming apps. It’s actually quite clumsy and I can’t really understanding why Apple have chosen this kind of platform.?

I wanted to watch “the middle”, it’s one of my favourite shows of all time and Apple TV was supposed to be one of the only places where all seasons were available, at least in Australia. I activated my account just for the show to be still behind a paywall, costing $3 per episode or $30 per season. If I tried to click on an episode it would redirect me to 10play, which I already have, but currently, as of writing this, only has 9 episodes available from the midpoint of season 2, and only stays available for a week or two. I just want to be able to watch the show in full, which I should be able to do, considering I have an active account and the general rule with streaming services is that everything is included when you have a subscription. It wasn’t disclosed beforehand that I would still have to pay for the show despite already paying for a subscription. Really misleading and disappointing on Apples part. Would be great if they could at the very least disclose what shows are available under the subscription and which aren’t. But for real if people are already giving you $13 a month they shouldn’t have to pay extra for shows that you advertise that you have. Cancelling my subscription.

All the 1-star reviews complaining about needing to pay twice tell you what you need to know. Apple has done a bad job combining three (potentially good) apps here: a typical paid video-streaming service; an Apple video store where you can buy/rent films and TV; and a centralised cross-app library where you can search for video across all your streaming services.The problem, of course, is that those all function very differently and carry very different user expectations. After I’ve paid for a streaming service, I expect that if I search for a director in that app, my subscription allows me to watch any video in the search results.Really poor implementation in my view. Hard to know if it’s incompetence, or intentional design and aimed at a market who think nothing of paying both a monthly subscription and an additional $10–20 to watch something unavailable on their current streaming services. Apple has always been priced as a premium brand but I think this design a misjudgement, given the ubiquity of iPhones and streaming apps. Spinning off a separate app for only the video available in an Apple TV subscription would improve the experience, for me.

Long day so I’ll keep it short. An Apple ‘household’ is buggy. Lighting works ok. Pretty quick but buggy at times. Just using that as an example. But compared to ChromeCasting and Google TV this is trash. I almost never use it. Apple TV plus is a never unless I get free trials with new hardware (which I must say is the best of the best). But the random pausing, drop outs etc, etc just make Apple TV a painful experience. If you love tech and aren’t tied to Apple like a prisoner then go with Google TV . - you’ll have much more flexibility. I run Apple Hardware with mostly Apple apps on my phones, watches, iPads, Mac’s EXCEPT for Apple TV. When it released it looked promising. Then Covid hit and I believe just everything took a downward turn. Google TV was already established and running well. Apple TV still had crappy boxes and just had software up and running — not good enough. Sad really. Could have been great. Don’t know where the good reviews are coming from but I can guess.