>> With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use.
I agree -- if I could separate these out into 3 categories rather than 2, Netflix/YT would be in a class of their own, way ahead of the pack.
I am constantly surprised how Apple TV offers such a poor experience despite their excellence in Product Management in other product areas. I was watching Apple TV last night and my wife and I slogged thru the recap and intro because we were so afraid of the app chocking on the "Skip" button.
Aside from Apple, which seems to be a Product Management issue, I find other platforms to bucket into two areas:
1. Poor performance, probably due to bad threading and poor cacheing
2. Incompatibility with older TVs. TVs last 8-10yrs easily these days, and features have topped off so people do not upgrade. This means you have a LOT of target builds and compatibility to check and I dont think they test all the possible builds.
What device are you using? I use Apple TVs, and Apple TV+ is consistently extremely high quality streaming for me. YouTube is incredibly painful to use because their tvOS UI is garbage. Quality's OK, though.
I'm using an Apple TV (device) to stream Apple TV (the streaming service.) Streaming quality is great, so agree on that. It is the bugginess of the app.
For example, with the Apple TV native remote, the silly touchpad is super clunky, painfully lacking the exponential fast forwarding i'm so used to with better services. The experience with the Samsung remote is very buggy. For example, when the "Dismiss" or "Skip" button shows up, the focus isnt the button, so you press it and the show stops and goes back to the main screen.
The buttons dont properly highlight when scrolling, the difference is so subtle it is hard to know what you are selecting (or not)
With the remote, it is easy to over or underscroll because of the sensitivity of the touchpad.
I'm not defending the stupid touchpad because it is indeed awful, but I worry you're not taking advantage of literally its only feature, because you say "lacking the exponential fast forwarding". The only reason I keep that annoying thing enabled at all, or that I don't just have it learn a random "real" remote and use that, is how good the Apple remote is with FF/Rewind. Assuming your streaming app is using the correct "native" video player, you're meant to hit (Center button) to pause/bring up the scrubber, then swipe quickly horizontally across the touchpad to move the playhead in large chunks. It's very accelerated, and if you need to say, rewind a movie from the credits to the beginning, it's about 3 swipes if you're swiping fast and vigorously. If you swipe slowly, on the other hand, you can go a couple minutes at a time.
Finally, if you want to jump a few seconds instantly, like if you just missed a few lines of dialogue, the thing to do is to physically press down the left or right directional pad (the edges of the circle) while praying to the touchpad gods that you don't accidentally quiver by 0.2mm and be detected as a swipe which will do the wrong thing.
Of course, it's proof of Apple's poor usability that literally anyone reading this who owns the device doesn't already know how to do all three of those functions. But we're still at the peak of the fad of 'minimalism' instead of putting dedicated buttons for each of these in an ergonomic arrangement and printing labels on them.
Apple TV+ is great on Roku (have an older 4K box that still has Toslink output). Also liked the experience on a newer Apple TV box that now has buttons for scrolling (only other Apple TV box I've used is the first generation which is touchpad only and I'm not a fan of)
I agree -- if I could separate these out into 3 categories rather than 2, Netflix/YT would be in a class of their own, way ahead of the pack.
I am constantly surprised how Apple TV offers such a poor experience despite their excellence in Product Management in other product areas. I was watching Apple TV last night and my wife and I slogged thru the recap and intro because we were so afraid of the app chocking on the "Skip" button.
Aside from Apple, which seems to be a Product Management issue, I find other platforms to bucket into two areas:
1. Poor performance, probably due to bad threading and poor cacheing
2. Incompatibility with older TVs. TVs last 8-10yrs easily these days, and features have topped off so people do not upgrade. This means you have a LOT of target builds and compatibility to check and I dont think they test all the possible builds.