I watched some of Apple’s recent shows using…different methods than the official app and I believe they’re making some of the best content out there, currently. Shows like Severance and For All Mankind are masterpieces and they give me the SciFi fix I desperately needed.
So I’ve decided to bite the bullet and get a subscription - after all, you should support the creators you’re really invested in, right?
Watching content on their platform is so painful - it’s one of the worst experiences I ever had. If you want to watch the shows in a browser, you need to use Microsoft Edge on Windows because that’s the only browser which comes with Playwright DRM - and it only works if you have a HDCP 2.2-capable screen. If you don’t have that, the content gets served in 480p with a low bitrate. Might as well just put in a VHS at this point.
There’s another alternative: The official Windows 11 app you can get from the store. It is indeed capable of serving you UHD streams…if it wants to. All episodes that are age-rated to 16+ currently don’t work, because they forgot to implement an age verification mechanism and pressing play doesn’t do anything at all. According to their forums, that even seems to happen on MacOS in some cases, so they really messed up the most important thing of their own streaming platform: Pressing Play to watch an episode.
Even if you’re lucky and you’re watching a show that isn’t age-restricted, they serve the content in the language your Apple account has been set to when you’ve created it by default. So every time you open an episode, you have to start it and switch the audio to English. If you go to your account settings to change the language it tells you that your subscription needs to end before you can do that. So you have to wait four weeks or a whole year to change the default language, depending on the subscription model.
Adding to that, sometimes the video streams just freeze, the audio doesn’t play at all or the app straightup crashes in the middle of a stream.
I have rarely seen a platform messing up the user experience this badly. It’s as if Apple doesn’t even want you to watch their own content. I’ve decided to not renew my subscription and procure the episodes from other sources. I wanted to give you money, Apple. But you fucked up.
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I am not sure “mildly infuriating” is accurate in this case.
The language thing sounds like real BS, but otherwise I haven’t had any of those issues in Firefox on Linux.
I’m still rocking an old 1080p plasma TV, but I probably would have noticed if good-looking shows like Severance, Silo, and Foundation were only rendering at 480p.
It does do this stupid thing where if I hit spacebar to pause, it will resume on its own about 4 seconds later. So I have to actually click on the video with the cursor to actually pause. So that’s annoying but nothing like a crash.
It works really well on iPhone and Apple TV. I imagine that is by designs AppleTV+ is a loss leader to get people to buy into the ecosystem. If you feel you have an ethical duty to support the creators, subscribing and continuing to obtain the content via alternative means is the best bet
Daddy Apple treat you like a child. 😉
Apple is incompetent at writing software for anything but their own devices. iCloud Web is also a disaster for example, and the old iTunes for Windows is infamous for being a buggy mess. Though I have to say they did a good job with the new web Apple Maps.
They aren’t incompetent, they want people to think “wow this is horrible, it must be my windows PC - I need to buy a MacBook!”
Which is funny. I get MLS season pass with my season ticket. I had to jump through so many hoops just to ACTIVATE this free thing. You can’t just visit a website. You need an account with a credit card. You either use an Apple device or iTunes. You can’t use their app on any platform (even the one youre going to use to watch it) to activate. Big thing is you cant even get iTunes on Linux without a huge hassle and wine. This isn’t even getting into that the android mobile app wasn’t even released till this year, like three years in.
The whole experience convinced me to NEVER buy anything Apple.
It is definitely a stupid strategy. I have a large iTunes library, and when they released the apple music app for windows a few years ago I tried switching over. Somehow the new app was even worse than iTunes, so I had to figure out how to switch everything back. At the same time I tried installing the iCloud app for PC - that may be literally the worst piece of software I have had the displeasure of using. It installed a bunch of services on my PC, added itself to the file explorer, and then failed to let me log into my account. That was also fun to figure out how to completely remove.
Maybe it is working again now… I have no real desire to test it again. Clearly they released these applications (after years of complaints) knowing that they weren’t functional, or possibly without any testing whatsoever. Overall it is a laughable effort from a company with a budget as large as Apple’s.
I always thought this was intentional. Apple TV doesn’t make them money, but it’s a gateway drug for you to completely move over to their ecosystem
Foundation is pretty excellent as well.
I go with the path of least resistance for top quality. I don’t think a subscription can give you this.
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Do not watch Constellation!
It’s a great show, but it was cancelled after the first season.
As per usual, Apple heavily prefers its own hardware and software. Using the TV app on my Mac the image quality of Apple TV+ blows all the other streaming services out of the water, but in the browser it’s a blurry, buffering mess 🤷♂️
My guess is they throw these Windows projects at summer interns.
Most likely the people using a windows browser to watch ATV+ is a minuscule percentage and doesn’t warrant the cost of implementing and maintaining a proper solution
Yarr !, my experience has been stellar ;) (Gaben: It’s a service problem…)
The only thing Apple ever got right was the iPhone. All their other software and services are shit.
The Xcode + developer network + App Store publishing is complete garbage. MacOS isn’t all that great either, at least if you come from a Linux background.
Mac OS is better than windows IMO. I use it for work but use Linux for my personal computers.
Well yeah, but being better than windows isn’t saying much.
My interest waned with the apple tv and its pos remote. Every update, on every app needed to have a password prompt.
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This reminds me of a gripe with LG WebOS, they dont require sign in or passwords to update the big apps but if you want to update plex you have to sign in. Pure bullshit.
Been running an AppleTV HD for two years, and I’ve never had to reinput my password, nor have I had any other issues with it. I charge the remote battery maybe twice a year, and everything just works, faster and smoother than any onboard smart tv os I’ve ever used.
Yeah idk my Apple TVs have been hands down the best set top boxes of any that I’ve tried.
I’ve ran into the apple hate crowd plenty of times. I don’t think they’re any kind of tech paragon, but my household includes the Apple TV, three HomePods, two iPhones and MacBook Air and all of them work together seamlessly.
My main PC is running EndeavourOS and hyprland, so at least there’s no windows in the house.
I used to be part of the anti Apple club.
I have tux tattooed on my chest, literally.
Tech tribalism (the Apple hate club) is dumb generally.
Hating on a trillion dollar company is never dumb 🙂
Thanks for the recommendation of For All Mankind , never heard of it. Looks good.
Honestly the UI in the official apps is atrocious too. For one, I find it so difficult just to get to a show’s season page to pick the next episode.
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It probably works fine if you use an Apple device, although people have run into the aged-restricted content not playing on MacOS, too.
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What do you watch it on?
TV.
Did you catch that the OP was watching on a computer?
The OPs experience is on a computer, so your experience with a TV doesn’t contradict their experience.
No contradiction implied.
Which what type of device? He’s talking about a Windows PC. I’m sure on the Apple TV device Apple TV+ works just fine.
Nvidia Shield and Roku.
I’m not the OC, btw.
