Thread

1. jonathanlydall · 1789988585 · focus · HN ↗

   In South Africa (and I imagine other countries) they're currently force migrating subscribers over to a "new" app (at least on iOS and tvOS) and your profiles with their respective watchlists is left behind in the old app, no way to migrate / import it into the new one. This isn't even mentioned on their FAQ for the process. A absolutely terrible user experience.

   On the bright side the "new" app (which I assume is actually the same as used in the US) seems to not have the following annoying issues of the old one:

   - It was impossible to enable auto play on a "kids" profile. As my kids can't use a remote yet I had their profile set to "adult".

   - An episode would never be marked as "fully" watched, but this wasn't just a mild annoyance, it would "break" autoplay when re-watching a series because when it started auto playing a next episode which was previously watched, it would "continue" from where you had watched upto (minus about 30 seconds). This results in it cycling through the last 30 seconds of every episode of a show. The easiest way around this I found was to make a new profile every now and again for the kids.

   1. mitxela · 1789990801 · focus · HN ↗

      I've worked for one of these companies as it rolled out a new app. Surprisingly, it didn't seem malicious. It was just platform/framework churn + "we need to unify all these apps into one common codebase"

      1. jonathanlydall · 1789996877 · focus · HN ↗

         I don't really mind their unification efforts making me have to install a new app which for me on its own is only a minor annoyance and absolutely not worth getting at all upset about.

         It's that they made no effort to bring over profiles and their associated watchlists, "continue watching" is my most used section of all the streaming apps (which they love moving every time I relaunch the app, but that's a different topic) and they didn't even apologize for essentially throwing away years' worth of tracking what the last episode I watched was.

         1. mitxela · 1790029423 · focus · HN ↗

            Of course they didn't. That's normal when you develop a new app.
   2. barbazoo · 1790001492 · focus · HN ↗

      Funny, autoplay functionality is exactly why I don't let my kid watch those.

      1. jonathanlydall · 1790005826 · focus · HN ↗

         This comes across to me as judgmental (and you don’t know the situation of my kids and their screen time), my view is to each their own, it’s an option you can turn on/off as per your own preference.

         1. barbazoo · 1790103533 · focus · HN ↗

            Sorry no I didn't mean to judge, it's like you said, everyone has a different requirement. One should have control which is something the billionaires don't want to give away.

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