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Comment by pkamb | Hacker News Reader

Two Apple TV apps I have recently discovered and love using:

Pluto.tv: replicate the cable guide experience. Endless episodes of things like This Old House, MST3k, and vintage game shows. I much prefer Pluto content to modern HGTV-type cable shows, and it scratches the same itch of "just watch whatever's on".

- https://pluto.tv/

Kanopy: use your library card or university ID to stream indie movies and documentaries. Free kids programming. Lots of PBS.

- https://www.kanopy.com/ - https://www.kanopy.com/kids

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I have to chime in with another recommendation for Pluto. The app is noticeably snappier than anything else on my 3 different models of Roku. (Weird since it’s free and Hulu, HBO, Sling et al should have plenty of money for development.). Sling especially has dark patterns selling DVR space and loses audio sync constantly. Pluto is rock solid by comparison.

Roku tends to have poor quality (outsourced) apps when companies have invested in a multiplatform system - brightscript doesn’t interoperate well with anything else so its usually an outsourced project.

Funny. The Roku MLB.tv app blows every other platform out of the water.

MLB has a world-class engineering team [1] so that's not a surprise. You might even say they're in a different league than other content providers.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/4/9090897/mlb-bam-live-strea...

Ha. Their Roku app is the best non-live viewing experience I've ever experienced for any sporting event: during live games you can jump to specific innings/plays, change audio feeds between TV announcers, radio announcers, and stadium-only... really impressive.

MLBAM must have done that in house. I'm not saying its impossible to do a good Roku app, it definitely is, and frequently its going to be faster because the language is fairly single purpose. But a roku team tends to need its own explicit resources. I've heard of a lot of gnashing of teeth from colleagues walking up to it, though I haven't played with it yet myself.

You think the Roku version of MLB is significantly better than, say, the Apple TV version of MLB? Why?

Never used the Apple TV version. But I have used the web and Android versions, and the Roku player blows them out of the water.

Better features.

My only complaint is that it completely freezes my firestick at least once a day. We plan on upgrading to something else so this shouldn't be a concern soon.

Samsung has TV Plus which is included with all Samsung smart TVs and includes some Pluto channels as well as other channels, which just scheduled internet video content. Something I just discovered recently. I like it because I want some background noise, and don't want to spend 10 minutes deciding on what content to watch.

Pluto is ok, except the quality stinks, and at least on my ISP, stutters on every streaming device in my house.

Pluto tv reminds me of those telemarketers that won't stop calling. Once I signed up I got endless spam and phishing attempts in my inbox making it almost unusable.

Hmm, I never actually signed up. It works without sign-in.

The commercials aren't great. I wish I could pay to have it cut to the (cool!) Pluto.tv splash screens rather than see ads.

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