Comment by al_borland

Comment by al_borland a day ago

21 replies

I’m using an AppleTV HD with Peacock and it’s pretty bad. I wouldn’t consider NBC a niche service. After an episode ends, I need to wait for the new one to start to be sure it marks the last one as watched. When going back to the main screen, it can take upwards of 30 seconds, maybe more (it feels like an eternity), for the “watch next” to update. If I don’t wait for it to update, it will start playing an old episode the next time I try to launch it. This lag also persists over app switching. So if I stop watching a show, switch to something else for a while, then go back to Peacock and quickly go into the series I was watching, it will play old stuff.

Even switching between 2 series in my currently watching list can take an exceedingly long time. Sometimes I try to switch back and forth to force and update and it feels like I’m back on 56K.

The Apple TV HD is old, technically legacy, but still supports tvOS 26. I have an Apple TV 4K in the house as well, which I’ve been meaning to migrate to, to see if it’s any better. But the HD works fine for pretty much everything else. Peacock as a service seems to have an extreme amount of lag.

llimllib a day ago

Yes I think the device itself is fine, but the Apple TV apps are mostly terrible and often very laggy/poorly written.

The way developers use the UI toolkit that the Apple TV provides also seems to tend towards apps where it's very difficult to figure out what's the active selection, which is of course _the_ critical challenge.

  • Reason077 20 hours ago

    The issue here is that the app developers design & test for the latest Apple TV 4K models, which have about 10X the performance (and 2-4X the RAM) compared to the old HD models.

    Apple left a large generational gap because they kept selling the HD for many years (until 2022) as an entry-level device alongside much more capable 4K models.

    > ”it's very difficult to figure out what's the active selection”

    Yes, based on my observation this seems to be one of the biggest challenges people face with the AppleTV interface, along with accidentally changing the selection when they try to select it (because of the sensitive touch controls on the remote).

    • wombatpm 11 hours ago

      Is that why the BritBox app is absolute garbage?

  • spockz 8 hours ago

    I have never noticed this issue. Buttons get highlighted in contrasting colours. Things like episode thumbnails get a different colour highlight border and sometimes even drop shadow. What I find harder to do is to see when going to the left means going to the menu on that side or just the previous tile.

  • al_borland 18 hours ago

    > it's very difficult to figure out what's the active selection

    I don't think is the fault of the 3rd party devs, Apple seemed to start this and other devs followed their example.

    I tend to make a small circle with my thumb in the center of the select button, or just slightly move it back and forth, to see what thing on the screen starts moving with me.

Melatonic 21 hours ago

Sounds just like a poorly written app. I'm surprised Apple doesn't enforce stricter performance guidelines.

On an older Roku Ultra Peacock also isn't great but not nearly as bad as you describe - maybe they just ported over their Roku version somehow and it has horrible Apple TV performance.

Anecdotally I have heard the newer Nvidia Shields to be very fast

aidenn0 a day ago

If you think Peackock is bad, try Paramount+, it's an impressively bad app that, along with being very laggy, will crash fairly regularly too.

  • joshtynjala 17 hours ago

    If you have a pihole or something that blocks ads/tracking for your entire network, try configuring it to exclude to your Apple TV. My Paramount+ app went from crashing daily to no crashes in many months.

    Technically, you could also configure the pihole to allow the specific hosts that the Paramount+ app needs to access. However, I found that there were many hosts, and they also change from time to time, so it can be annoying to keep them updated when the app starts crashing again.

  • cosmic_cheese a day ago

    When there's a Star Trek running, I subscribe to Paramount+ via the Apple TV+ channel instead of directly, despite it costing a touch more, just to avoid having to use Paramount's official app (instead, one uses the Apple TV app and plays media with the stock tvOS player). It's absurd how much that improves the experience.

    • al_borland a day ago

      It plays inside the AppleTV app?

      I hooked Peacock to the Apple TV app, and while it shows my next playing episode, launching from the Apple TV app just launches the Peacock app, which feels rather pointless.

      • cosmic_cheese a day ago

        You have to subscribe with the Apple TV+ channel specifically for it to play in the Apple TV app (confusing, I know). Not all services offer a TV+ channel, unfortunately.

        • al_borland 21 hours ago

          Hmm... I guess I'll check into that next time and pay more attention. I subscribed to Peacock+ through a bundle offer with Apple TV+, and went through Apple to trigger the purchase. It forced me over to Peacock to make an account there and other than billing it seemed totally separate.

  • wirelessguy 13 hours ago

    It really is. I cancelled my subscription recently because streaming in the app rarely worked. The only way to watch anything is either download it first if I'm watching on my tablet or use Chromecast to cast via the app on my phone. It was the same bad experience across Google TV, Android and iOS devices.

  • array_key_first 21 hours ago

    Paramount plus is one of the worst apps I've ever used. It's so bad that I can only assume they tried as hard as possible to be is unusable. Unstable, slow, and lots of things just don't work right.

    • drewg123 16 hours ago

      What gets me is the "play/pause" button behavior on a firestick remote. How many presses of play/pause would you think it takes to pause then resume playing? 2? Oh, no. Its 4! Pressing play/pause on the remote brings up the UI, like a mouse-over on some crappy web-player. You have to hit pause twice to actually pause the video. Then play again brings up the UI, then you have to hit it again to play again.

      And don't even get me started on the times where the app opens and plays OK. Then you go to ff/rw and all it will let you do is pause. So you have to re-start the app to get control. Then it forgets where you are.

      • wolvoleo 11 hours ago

        Another big issue with the fire tv is that it just refuses to work when there's no internet access. It just shows an error page you can't get out of. So I can't even play local content through VLC or Jellyfin.

      • array_key_first 15 hours ago

        My favorite is the "sorry, we can't play this" just randomly out of nowhere in the middle of an episode. You were playing it just fine, what happened?

        And, of course, the crashes. I don't think I've ever seen an app crash this much. It makes me very worried for the codebase.

  • cout 13 hours ago

    I recall it playing the same ad repeatedly during commercial breaks. I think i once watched the same ad 5 times in a row.

    Later I subscribed to paramount+ via amazon, and said goodbye to the glitches.

wrs a day ago

Pretty much every streaming app I use (not just on AppleTV) has a hard time remembering where I left off. I now have the habit of skipping through the credits and letting the app play the last 8 seconds and close the episode itself, in the perhaps misguided hope that then it will remember I've played the episode.

  • al_borland a day ago

    Exactly. The issue of marking as played is not unique to Peacock, but Peacock’s lag makes it take even longer to get confirmation that some of the other apps I’ve used. Netflix has the same issue and some lag to it, but it’s less lag.

brewdad 21 hours ago

It sounds like an older version of the app. I used to see all kinds of similar issues with Peacock on my Apple 4k device. NBC has put work in to make the app better over the years unlike say, Paramount+. I would check to see if you can manually update the app or try the 4k device and see if it works better. It could be the older chip and more limited memory of the HD device are hitting up against their limits too.