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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

I’m fine with the decision except that their app sucks. It’s by far the worst streaming app. The iOS version is ok. Embedded versions like in PlayStation and TV just hang 100% of the time on suspend and resume. If they want to own the relationship they need to get their shit together.

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Don't sleep on the Prime app in the race to Worst.

The Prime app on iPad won't stream at high resolution. The only workaround I've found is to play in a Web browser on the iPad. The overall experience is worse than other streaming apps (but still better than HBO Max, obviously).

100% agree. I switched from channels to HBO Max because my cellular carrier offered it for free, but the experience is absolutely awful. Constant buffering, not remembering what you’ve watched and difficulty finding things really detract.

HBO Max is almost unusable. It is so slow and buggy that on some days we literally could not watch something we wanted. The interface is also atrocious.

Netflix is good. Amazon Prime is pretty good. HBO Max is terrible. Hulu is kinda crappy. Paramount plus is okay (only use it for Star Trek).

Weird, must be platform-specific. HBO and Hulu are fine on Roku. In fact, after subscribing to a bunch more services than I used to (I was Netflix-only for a really long time) I'm probably going to cancel all but those two, because the UIs are pretty good (Amazon's lost me purely over their UI) and their selection crushes everyone else (for my tastes, anyway—these days I'd rank Netflix under Kanopy, which is free, in terms of which service I'd most want to keep).

I see my issues on both Roku and through a separate smart TV, so I'm not convinced that is it.

Guess I got lucky. I know there's some variability in performance of Roku devices, which can extend to stability of applications. I've got two nearly-identical but different-brand TVs with embedded Rokus, and the older TCL one is rock solid and snappy, but the newer one (Hisense brand) is laggy and everything crashes frequently on it.

Now that CBS ceded to Paramount Plus app, Paramount forgets to update Monday week day late night shows before Tuesday morning. Tuesday shows work on Wed AM, Wed shows on Thu AM, and so on, but not Monday shows on Tue AM.

This was all fine until Paramount opted out of some of the aggregated UI APIs.

Also, their language support is absolute garbage compared to Netflix. Most shows support multiple audio and subtitle languages, which is great for learning.

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