MS NOW: Watch Live News

I just updated the app last night to MS NOW”, and so I’m not completely familiar with the changes from the old, MSNBC app. But one change that I have noted is an especially unfortunate one. It used to be easy to share videos with others, simply by clicking on the share button that appeared on just about all the videos. And now it’s missing. I hope this is just an oversight and will be corrected soon. Other glitches: it used to be fairly simple to switch from portrait to landscape view. Now the app seems to be set up to primarily watch in portrait view, which is much less convenient when watching on the tablet. They also don’t seem to have their “update” times figured it out. When I looked at it this morning, many videos were shown to have been last updated one hour ago, even though many of them were posted last night or earlier. Other than these complaints, which I don’t consider minor, the app has generally been a pretty good one. Gives the ability to watch segments of of broadcasts for many of the top people at MSNOW/MSNBC. (Note: I assume anyone reading this review already knows that this network has a decided liberal bias. I personally am a moderate and prefer news from reporters without a bias. But I like to get a wide range of perspectives in my news intake. And I respect the work of several of the MSNOW/MS NBC reporters, tho not all.)

I stream evening MSNBCprograms on my phone while making dinner. For the past year, when my fave show Reid Out came on, inexplicably, service would freeze every few minutes or every 15 seconds. I'd have to turn off my phone to get it back. Latest upgrade, changed things for the worst. It made it harder to start live streaming and get the image to fill the screen. It offered more links and headlines and junk getting in the way of just turning on the show. Here's the kicker. Today, a few days into the latest update this app suddenly informed me I had to turn off my ad blockers to watch the program I had just brought up. You mean there is an ad blocker that turns of MSNBC's dreadful pharmaceutical ads for erectile dysfunction, female incontinence, the gold mine of life insurance buybacks that show retirees as too ignorant to know what they're "sitting on" but the men working mining jobs are smarter about about? I digress. The answer is no. There is no such ad blocker for TV ads, but MSNBC wants to control the possibiliity that a live stream viewer may wander into the blog or newsletter section and start reading without the barrage of internet ads? MSNBC, you are better than this. Get it together. And stop with the ageist ads that insult half your viewing audience.

I watch MSNBC every day, sometimes I have it on all day, and the app lets me watch it while I’m away from home. App works very well EXCEPT that it freezes frequently and usually I can’t get it to unfreeze. Sometimes, after several minutes, it will begin to play again on its own but usually it stays stuck. I then have to go back to the MSNBC Home page, select Live TV and hope it will play correctly. In the meantime I’ll have missed part of the program. And sometimes, when a live program has frozen, it won’t let me go back to the MSNBC Home page at all and I actually have to turn my device off, then back on, select the MSNBC app... and start all over. This is very annoying and such a pain that I often just quit watching - which is certainly not what I want to do! But when a live program has frozen twice, or more, during a single viewing, it is just too aggravating and frustrating to go through the process of trying to get it to unfreeze and restart. Grrrrrrr!