Worst streaming app/channel you’ve encountered?

[Lance Uppercut]

I’m sure there’s a lot of low budget ones with crappy libraries, but man, for such a big company, the Funimation one is quite a pain in the ass.

Roku or phone/Tablet, it’s kind of a mess.

I mean I’m glad that they have whole series for free, but: Commercial, theme song, commercial again is quite a long wait. sometimes their commercial placement is quite off as there’s always one commercial that comes up out of nowhere and not during an intentional ad break of the original broadcast. Dragon ball for some reason, they don’t have the Preview for the next episode, so they can’t put it there or before the end theme song (as no one would watch it) sot hey just put one randomly during the first half

You can’t change the language until the show has started (on phone) and in some shows, changing the language require the entire episode to relaunch.

If you happen to press the screen during a commercial, the app will take you a website for the product.

Also, if you press the wrong episode or format, you have to wait until the initial commercial plays and finishes before you can go back

I don’t. Know why but some episodes are free to watch and some are “for subscribers”. I don’t know why you’d give me dragon ball and dragon ball Z/super for free but expect me to pay for GT. Why DB doesn’t Have an english option. I was looking at Yu Yu Hakusho library again for some reason, and there’s like 1 free episode to 4 or 5 subscriber episodes on Roku, but all free on my iPad.

Won’t play on chrome cast, as least for free, but you can watch on Roku. Roku, you Can choose the language before the show or during the show, so that’s good. But it’s weird how sometimes they don’t subtitle the actual theme song and the subtitles are close captions. Not to mention, Roku, when you sign in, if the username is too long, you can’t sign in unless you ruse the actual remote control (instead of the phone app) which sucked for me as I had lost the phone and had to borrow my brother’s.

[Lance Uppercut]

I actually like the WWE network, and din’t have problems with the old version. The new one is cool, if not some Netflix ripoff. I’m glad they got rid of the TV Ratings, but there was a point until recently where every time I tried to load show from “recently uploaded” it kept sending me to the 1993 king of the ring.

Also, the “resume watching” feature is still iffy. Sometimes it’s not there. Or it won’t send me back to the spot I last watched.

[Long A, Short A]

Watching the CW is a comedy of errors and it's been that way for a decade. I have the app on my phones, but I rarely open it up. I still have battle scars from trying to watch Girlfriends and One Tree Hill on my computer back in the day. I have the app on my fire stick, but I stick to watching the latest shows and I don't mess around with the show's navigation bar. Plus, I don't need to see the same commercial for budget phone or acne treatment fiftyleven times in less than an hour.

[Rican]

I got rid of it a while back so IDK about any updates but the WWE Network was pretty bad. Had a hard time finding what parts of the show I wanted to watch and finding shows at all some time.

[MC Blowfish]

I wasn't a plan of WWE Network. I used to have it years ago and I always had issues with it streaming. I restarted my subscription last year and while it worked far better. I felt like it was harder to find matches. If I did a search for Dustin Rhodes, I would get sent to the entire show, instead of just the match.

[YAKMAN is ICHIBAN]

NJPW World on the fire stick was really rough for awhile. Most of the kinks have been worked out so it doesn't frequently crash like it did. It used to make me log in every time too.

[Raskovnik]

ESPN+ regularly crashes for me every time I try watching the damn fights. If I was watching most other sports I wouldn't care as much but considering how shit can turn on a dime in fighting I wish they'd get their act together.

[Rave]

Crunchyroll's Playstation apps are buggy as hell and tend to freeze consoles.

[Bo Rida]

ITV player was an unsusable mess, probably still is but there hasn't been anything I've wanted to watch on it for years.

[Deleted]

Music one but I'll count it - the iHeartRadio app on the PS4 is absolutely horrendous. It crashes constantly, tends to get caught in a loop of playing the same couple of songs over and over, it lags like crazy trying to search for anything, and the live radio basically doesn't work at all because it is extremely frequent that on coming back from commercial it just goes silent, and when that happens there's really nothing you can do but close the app and try it again.

The Fire Stick version of it also isn't great - it tends to keep playing music no matter what, including when you open up other apps, unless you pause it first, the text still lags, on opening it it has a bad habit of getting hung up on a popup trying to push random stations on you that actively blocks trying to just get to what you're actually looking for and tends to require some working around to get rid of, and it still gets stuck in loops - but at least the live radio actually works (though sometimes it'll play two sets of commercials overlaid on top of each other) and it has some features the PS4 one doesn't.

[Bub (BLM)]

Sept 19, 2019 12:35:48 GMT -5 YAKMAN is ICHIBAN said:

NJPW World on the fire stick was really rough for awhile. Most of the kinks have been worked out so it doesn't frequently crash like it did. It used to make me log in every time too.

Yeah, I had all of the same issues. It was horrible for a couple months.

[Powerline]

If Twitch on PS4 counts...I don't know if it's the app or something with settings streamers use, but I often have to reload streams after 20-ish minutes because the sound will lag behind the video.

I also used to have trouble with early WWE Network on PS4, but it seemed to clean up its act recently. The 360 app was also a wreck, but I've not used it since getting the PS4.

VRV on PS4 has an issue of dropping connection. Which wouldn't be so bad, but it makes an obnoxious sound when it loses connection. And THAT wouldn't be so bad, except the notification flickers with the footage, so you hear it 7 or 8 times on top of itself in a matter of about 4 seconds before it eventually decides you lost the connection. And none of my other apps drop connection as much as VRV does, which just makes me think a combination of their app/servers are janky.

[Cela]

HBO Go is absolute shit. Rare to watch anything without it needing to halt buffer ever 20 seconds.

[Deleted]

Actually, to revisit the subject of Funimation - its PS4 and Fire Stick apps are for the most part fairly functional, but the actual navigation of it's basically a disaster (not helped by how Funimation's genre divisions make absolutely no sense - I'll reluctantly grant Danganronpa but in what world is Zombieland Saga horror?), changing from subs to dubs or vice-versa can be a major slog, and the service has a very clear pattern of after you've watched two or three episodes suddenly growing much slower to the point of being basically unusable. There've been times it's legitimately been easier when I'm in the middle of a show to drop from Funimation and go to the system browser to finish watching it through unofficial means.

Also for some insane reason the Pause / Play button on the Fire Stick just... doesn't work. Or to be more exact, it only pauses or plays for as long as you're holding the button. You have to use the confirm button to actually properly play or pause a video.

Additionally I think this problem's been fixed now but for awhile there any show that was reliant on translations of onscreen text was basically unwatchable because annotations on that stuff just... sometimes wouldn't work. It took me months to finish Is This a Zombie because Eu's dialogue frequently just plain wouldn't function.

[fw91]

Wwe network was pretty crappy with live streaming during it’s infancy. Hell
It still can be choppy and lagging depending on the platform you use. Summerslam was a chore to watch on PS4

[Gopher Mod]

PlayStation Vue is to me a terrible service. Price-wise it isn't bad; however, its constant buffering and poor video quality even with connection speeds that should be able to maintain multiple 4K streams at once made it incapable.

As a contrast, YouTube TV has been a LOT better in that regard; I've only run into minor issues with it over the last year or so since I got it, most of which was "turn it off and turn it back on again".

[Deleted]

Sept 19, 2019 14:18:57 GMT -5 Gopher Mod said:

PlayStation Vue is to me a terrible service. Price-wise it isn't bad; however, its constant buffering and poor video quality even with connection speeds that should be able to maintain multiple 4K streams at once made it incapable.

As a contrast, YouTube TV has been a LOT better in that regard; I've only run into minor issues with it over the last year or so since I got it, most of which was "turn it off and turn it back on again".

Really the only issue I have with Youtube TV is first opening or closing it tends to be a major drag on my laptop. It runs very well besides that, much better than Vue did when I had it.

[Rave]

Youtube's 3DS app worked fine 'til late last year, when the morons decided to "update" it and made it completely unusable. To add insult to injury, instead of fixing what their shoddy "update" caused or rolling it back to when it worked correctly, they chose to sunset it. Incredibly frustrating.

[chronocross]

WWE network was great at least after it got the bugs/glitches out as you could watch 3 or 4 Raws in a row without any buffering, now with the new update once an episode finishes it goes to the end of the next one which is weird.

[Koda, Master Crunchyroller]

Sept 19, 2019 14:05:32 GMT -5 Lizuka #BLM said:

Actually, to revisit the subject of Funimation - its PS4 and Fire Stick apps are for the most part fairly functional, but the actual navigation of it's basically a disaster (not helped by how Funimation's genre divisions make absolutely no sense - I'll reluctantly grant Danganronpa but in what world is Zombieland Saga horror?), changing from subs to dubs or vice-versa can be a major slog, and the service has a very clear pattern of after you've watched two or three episodes suddenly growing much slower to the point of being basically unusable. There've been times it's legitimately been easier when I'm in the middle of a show to drop from Funimation and go to the system browser to finish watching it through unofficial means.

Also for some insane reason the Pause / Play button on the Fire Stick just... doesn't work. Or to be more exact, it only pauses or plays for as long as you're holding the button. You have to use the confirm button to actually properly play or pause a video.

Additionally I think this problem's been fixed now but for awhile there any show that was reliant on translations of onscreen text was basically unwatchable because annotations on that stuff just... sometimes wouldn't work. It took me months to finish Is This a Zombie because Eu's dialogue frequently just plain wouldn't function.

Off topic but I’ll defend FUNi putting ZLS under horror because it is about zombies. That makes it a horror comedy idol show.

That aside yeah their apps have this weird thing of functioning but having a bunch of weird quirks to them.