Frndly TV

Not all of the channels have audio description, not sure if that has to do with the networks or the app however, when I record a movie that has audio description, it doesn’t transfer over to the recording. It’s difficult for someone who is blind, or has low vision (legally blind). I don’t know if this is something that can be fixed, but it would be great to have all the description when recording, because if you don’t watch the movie live on certain networks that actually have audio description, it makes it really difficult to watch a recorded movie. There’s close captioning on everything, whether you watch it live or if you watch it on the replay/recording. The blind and visually impaired don’t have that option to have audio description on everything. We don’t know what’s happening in a story when someone is reading a message. By text or email or hand written note. We miss out on facial expressions, so we don’t always know if we should laugh at some thing or be surprised or just be able to enjoy a movie or TV show like others who have full vision, so we miss out on part of the story. Also, it would help to have picture in picture. Having low vision means that there is some vision and at times one needs to access other apps on their smart device. I would like to be able to hear the movie and multitask.

The idea of Frndly TV is a great value proposition, and it is a good deal if you can tolerate the problems. At first, I reckoned the value was good even though it is a new way to get TV and has the learning curve problems of very few bells and whistles plus bugs in the software. As it stood, it was a solid 4 rating. Unfortunately, the last 2 updates have shown that the company has grossly wrong priorities. Rather than improve the aps to deliver a solid product, they chose to ignore the problems and weaknesses to work on new ways to advertise at the customers’ expense. The last change did nothing to improve the obvious shortcomings of the programming and add a home page that is there simply to be a vehicle for selling ads. A “home” page should focus on those things chosen by user, but instead they have chosen to diminish access to what the user wants and increase prominence of stuff the user has no desire to have clogging his home page at all. Mistakes like this are hard to overlook because they can only come from bad upper management that has no clue as to what it takes to have a sellable product for the users. They will eventually lose all of their users to a netter run company, and with diminishing user base, they will lose all those advertising dollars that they saw as more important than subscribers.

Let me open by saying I LOVE this streaming service, and I loved the app up until recently when Hallmark Movies Now and Dove Channel were made available. I used to be able to search for a movie I recorded, and it would show up in the search results, almost always as the first option. Now, I search for a movie, and the majority (if not all) the hits are from Hallmark Movies Now and Dove, even though I may have recorded the movie as recently as a few hours earlier. It is so frustrating (and I have to PAY for Hallmark Movies Now, which I do not want to do, since I have the movies recorded that I want to watch 🙄). The other option is to scroll through all the movies in My Recordings which I’ve recorded in the past 9 months to find the one I want. Very time consuming when I can just search for it...or USED to be able to search for. Please bring the ability to search recordings back...and drop the Hallmark Movies Now from the search...or give it its own tab at the bottom...especially if you are requiring subscribers to pay extra for it.