A&E: TV Shows That Matter

This app still needs serious improvements. Extremely glitchy play on videos. There are other apps (THAT I PAY FOR) who offer some of the same shows, however apparently A&E only streams the most current season of their shows here on the A&E app. So if you want to catch up on the most current episodes of shows like 60 days in, accused guilty or innocent or any shows aired on A&E you must watch here on this app. (BTW I have my tv provider linked so I do have full access on this app) The problem is the playability of the shows on this app is atrocious. At each ad break on the videos the video glitches out and it jumps you forward like 10 mins in the show to the next ad break. So if you’re not paying attention to that you will miss big chunks of the show each time there’s a commercial. And if you do catch it you then have go rewind the video back to after the ad block that SHOULD HAVE played and restart from there, hoping that the whole video doesn’t glitch out from having to do that and force you to close everything out and restart all together. I could watch these shows on other video platforms that I pay a subscription fee for and that have NO playback issues whatsoever, but apparently A&E doesn’t offer these platforms up to date content forcing you to rely on this janky app to try to stay current on content. Which is very frustrating in general, let alone if - like me - you pay for the content in multiple ways (tv services, subscriptions to other platforms that include the content, etc.)

There are quite a few shows on this app that I really really enjoy. But I’m so used to being able to use the picture in picture function on the other streaming app in case I need to look up something that was just mentioned on the show that I want to understand better or if I get a text message from someone or a notification about something… And this app does not offer that feature. So I have to close the app temporarily to do whatever I need to do and then when I go back it always makes me watch ads again. 4 as in a row every 4 or 5 minutes is too much, especially when it’s the same 4 ads each time. And if one of the ads happens to be annoying or in some way offensive to you, you’re going to have to watch that ad 7 or 8 times in one episode. I would not mind the number of ads so much if it were not the same ads over and over. The repetitiveness is so tedious. I would use the app much more often if the picture in picture feature was available. There are a lot of shows on the app that I would really like to watch but the app is so inconvenient and there are other streaming apps that don’t present these problems. So I often find myself starting an episode and then getting frustrated and switching to a different show on a different streaming service. it’s very strange that the feature that is offered by pretty much every video streaming app is still not available on this one.

This is a decent app but definitely not the best. We travel a lot so we mostly watch our tv shows and movies on apps through our phones and iPad but A&E is the only one we run into the problem of having to wait an entire week or until the next episode airs, to be able to watch our show. We LOVE Live PD but here it is May 4th and we were just now able to watch the episode from April 26th. Most apps you can watch after midnight or even as its airing especially when you can log in with your service provider which we have but on this A&E app even with a logging in with a service provider you still can’t watch for an entire week. We love to discuss our shows with friends and family so it would be nice to be able to do it with our A&E shows too. By a weeks time, everyone is done discussing the previous weeks episode especially with Live PD since it is aired every single Friday and Saturday. Especially with social media these days, we would love to not have to stay off of ours just to avoid spoilers. Come on A&E please get it together and provide your viewers with at least the same experiences that all other networks have.