NOW

Firstly, this app doesn’t support a single function of the Apple TV remote - you can’t click the left side of the wheel to go back 10 seconds, you have to pause, bring up some on screen controls, swipe to a rewind control, click that, wait ten minutes while it goes back ten seconds and then hit play. You can’t search using the Siri button, in fact, if you want to search in the app you have to scroll through 15 rows of content to get to the search button and that scrolling is painfully slow, one row at a time. If you get there, you can’t type using the usual onscreen character entry of course, no, you have to do it painfully slowly using the terrible one NowTV have provided. You can’t speak into the remote to enter text either. Video playback is terrible quality despite my gigabit internet connection, regularly stalls or the app just dies. Apple have provided everything a developer could need to create a perfect media streaming application and NowTV have decided to ignore all of it and provide their own janky versions. All of this assumes you can actually launch the app in the first place, because if you use a privacy preserving DNS service like NextDNS then the app won’t even launch because of the sheer amount of spyware they’ve loaded it with. Apple, please, if you care about your users at all, reject this app until they go away and fix it all to use the proper APIs provided.

Where to start? The service itself has lacklustre content when compared to other providers, some shows are great but the content is so limited. Most providers have pulled their content, once HBO Max comes to the U.K. this year and starts pulling even more content Sky will be a laughing stock. The price is cheaper than Sky but is still far in excess of other streaming providers. Nearly everyone I know that uses Now, uses it because of an offer because at its standard price it’s overpriced. That’s neither a good business model or a good user experience. Talking about poor user experience is the app, I have just tried to watch something on Now, the app froze so I reinstalled the app and I still can’t watch the content I want because it still doesn’t play. On top of this is the experience I had a couple of months ago where they locked me out of my account for 3 days with no notice due to “unusual activity”, I had to chase them to get access again (guess what, they carried on taking money while my account was locked though). There is simply better content and better pricing on every other streaming service.

Why on earth, when the app is connected to a Chromecast, did they think it was a good idea to disable the rewind function (eg click to rewind/fast forward 10s) and leave you with the tiniest scrub bar that doesn’t even show you what time you’ve actually scrubbed to? So when using an iPhone, you have to just guess when to let go of the scrub bar when your are rewinding/fast forwarding, meaning that you end up minutes away from where you wanted to be as opposed to seconds! Also, why is the Chromecast considered its own device? The device system in NowTv is already hellish with its “wait a month before you can change your devices” policy which is immensely silly, but with having the Chromecasts as a device you lose multiple valuable slots for usable devices. I have multiple Chromecasts which means I can’t watch NowTv on my devices, but I can cast from them... It’s mind boggling daft. Then there’s streaming quality, endless drop offs in quality resulting in some of the worst streaming experiences I’ve ever had. I use essentially all of the major streaming services, and none of them come close to the issues I have had with NowTv. Now they also want to charge you to have 1080HD?! I understand that this may sound like first world issues but this is 2021 not 2005. They’re Windows App is equally awful. If it wasn’t for the quality of their content I wouldn’t still be a member... It’s about the only thing they do well.