Let’s face it – being able to watch TV on our iPhones is an app wanted by more people than any other single app. And there is a free App that offers this (TV.com). And there is a free demo download service that offers this (MobileTV). And there was supposed to be a free? live streaming App out on June 17 (iReshet) that offers this. Yet all of these have problems.
iReshet, despite the world premier presentation at WWDC in May and the promise to be available from June 17, has not yet appeared in iTunes – and no amount of research has revealed when its likely to appear! MobileTV is there for the downloading – but we were unable to get the thing to work, despite numerous attempts! And we are not the only ones experiencing this problem
Now TV.com is a different matter. It does work – and there are some people who LOVE it! It offers access to some of the best shows on TV for watching – for free – on our iPhones. So why is it that 65% of those that have reviewed the app in the past (some 78 thousand reviews!!), give it the thumbs down?
Well, one reviewer of the latest TV.com app puts it quite well:
Shows don’t have episode numbers so its hard to watch anything in order, and most are limited to 20 or so arbitrary episodes. Also, show quality varies a lot and no matter how good the video, the audio is often out of sync. Sometimes this can be corrected by restarting playback, but not often. I watch over wi-fi and find the shows can be slow to start streaming I usually wait for the buffer to move a few notches before watching.
If left to its own devices, the app starts playing too soon and playback freezes or gets choppy because it hasn’t downloaded enough data. The kind of manual buffer management should not be required. And since episodes are chopped up into 15- or 20-minute segments, this process must be repeated to get through the show. Frustrating. But this app has promise, so hope the developers are reading this feedback
We have included this comment in full – both because its so comprehensive and because we thought it might get more noticed by the TV.com App developers if it is more widely published!
Note that the latest version has been given the thumbs up by 65% of reviewers – with several of those that gave it a two or one star rating, appearing to do so because they do not to know how to use the app! So, we recommend that you check out the App guide before you try to use it! And check out the latest version because you might well find that the improvements make the app worth using –we have. But only available in the US folks!!