Every weekday morning follows a pattern. Get up, make coffee, grab the newspapers, and throw on a late-night episode from the night before. I turn on the TV, press 'menu' to wake up the Apple TV, and wait for it to load an outdated watchlist. Clicking on the 'TV' app brings a new view that loads with a few more new episodes of followed shows visible from the night before: still no Seth Meyers though.
A long hold and jump to the Hulu app leads me to a loading screen while Hulu fetches my new content. Somehow their 'Lineup' panel and 'Keep Watching' still haven't caught on that I watch Late Night with Seth Meyers first thing in the morning. So I navigate up to 'My Stuff', down to 'TV Shows', click on the appropriate square for Seth Meyers, land on an individual page view for the episode, and hope that by this time NBC has properly uploaded the ad-free version of the show. Even at eight in the morning on the west coast, I sometimes have to fall back to the DVR recording of the show from NBC Bay Area with natural commercials as well as inserted Hulu-only commercials. All this and more for a low, low price of $40 a month.
The more time I spend with the Apple TV, the more convinced I am that Apple cannot provide the seamless experience I would expect from their product offerings. Even the facets of the Apple TV that fall in line with Apple's vertical integration, such as purchasing TV shows from iTunes, don't work the way I'd expect. We're a household that buys all episodes of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee ahead of time with season passes. And yet just yesterday we realized we were two episodes (weeks!) behind. Apple's bundling of episodes had completed for our previous purchase. In no way were we warned or presented with the offer to buy the next volume of episodes. In order for new ones to populate the watchlist, we had to search for 'Samantha Bee,' hunt around in the UI for the proper volume, purchase it and watch the first one. Problem solved until the next volume of episodes releases.
Let's not mention this delightful app that somehow never remembers the only Apple TV it has ever connected to in the phone's lifetime.
My Apple TV is connected to wired ethernet and power, yet it behaves as though it's operating from a very low battery and doing it's hardest to save me on my data plan: please don't. Ideally Apple would establish push-notification style connections for these content providers so that as they put up new material, my Apple TV is alerted and refreshes accordingly. If that's a bridge too far, then how about setting a refresh point early in the morning to fetch all relevant content from the night before? I'm tired of dancing with the watchlist, scrolling through and selecting something only for the watchlist to refresh mid-scroll and lead me to selecting unintended content. Why do I need to launch the Hulu app and then wait for content to refresh? I have seen and know there is some precedent for background refreshes of apps, but it seems like it only happens when the Apple TV is awake. This should be done before I begin engaging with the device for the day. Is it poor planning, poor coding, or both? Whatever the reasons, it leaves me stewing, waiting for a competitor that gets in the way less of how I want to watch things.