It made me so thankful for piracy. What an abysmal experience. First of all, I’m on mobile and they make you use the app. There is literally no way to get around it except TOR, no using browser, even on desktop mode, as somone like me who is deaf, it means I can’t have my special accessibility extensions which sucks.
So I get to the app ready to watch my show. Bam Adds! Worse than youtube! It’s like an add every 5-10min that lasts from 5-40s. Who the hell can actually enjoy a movie or a TV show in these conditions?
I was like fine, I’ll download it to watch offline then. Nope, that’s blocked now. So I figured I’d tinker with DNS and see if I could manage to block those adds. That didn’t work.
I’m so glad piracy exists. I see streming services have gone full circle. No better than paying an absurd amount for a TV channel plastered with adds. Urgh. I’ll make sure to stay away from disney restaurants now so they can’t legally kill me since I watched an episode of futurama on their platform.
Wait. Why does it have ads? Aren’t you paying them for an ad free experience? If not, what’s the point?
They have an ad plan and an ad-free plan for different costs. I personally couldn’t ever imagine myself paying for the privilege of watching ads (and I do pay for D+), but, ¯_(ツ)_/¯
D+ works fine for me on my old cheap Android box, my Nvidia SHIELD and our AppleTV, so I think the ‘slow and clunky’ part might be a Roku specific issue.
The app design choices though are a mess in other ways. There isn’t a ‘mark as watched’ option, so when it doesn’t mark that you watched something (which happens semi-frequently), it attempts to start you on an episode you’ve already watched and you’ve got to fast forward through it. It doesn’t have ‘continue watching’ so unless your show is brand new, you’ve gotta go through the menus to re-find the thing you’re watching. It’s “pretty” enough at first glance and looks good, but actual usability is not great at all.
Plex & Jellyfin definitely have the better experience, for sure.
Almost certainly. I have a couple of them and they’re like, fine, but the app quality is uneven AF. They’re written by the provider and/or some random 3rd party, so some apps work well, some work poorly, and some are flaming piles of crap.
The Disney app being a flaming pile does not, however, surprise me in the least.
Interesting details. I’ve thought about Roku’s a few times and the app quality has always been the thing people seem to complain about, so I’ve just avoided them.
I mean, for a $15 thing that does 4k your options are pretty much a Roku, or whatever Amazon’s thing is called.
I’d MUCH rather have the Roku. And the Plex and Jellyfin apps work great, so what else do you need ;)
Most streaming services have introduced cheaper “ad-supported” tiers within the last few years while jacking up the prices of the existing tiers. There is usually a price gap designed to either make you sit through ads or overpay to remove them. Many (most?) people don’t even use ad-blockers in their web browsers and are psychologically trained to sit through ad breaks, either because of TV (older generation) or YouTube (younger generation) which is why these streaming companies can get away with such a betrayal of their original premise.