Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

When people say this is one of the worst streaming apps ever made, believe them: this app is guaranteed to change your relaxing afternoon watching television into a session of tearing your hair out. It really says something about how utterly broken an application is when it fails at delivering its most basic function in a reliable manner: constant buffering, frequent application crashes, fails at loading preview snapshots for the shows no matter how long you wait, will not allow you to skip the intros BUT will absolutely randomly skip entire sections of video when switching in and out of commercial mode. Just to twist the blade in further, it also seems to buffer furiously during commercials, routinely turning 1min commercial breaks into 5-6min ones. Now to be fair, this seems to be an issue specifically with the Firestick version of the app, and there seems to be some good days where everything works okay and then some really bad ones where nothing does, but the latter seems to be the norm rather than the exception: it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that on bad days the buffering issue is so severe at times that it happens almost once per minute. To put that into perspective, imagine a single 40 minute episode of Star Trek getting stretched out into an agonizing 2 hours, most of that time frame showing a buffering icon on screen that breaks up the show's ebb and flow to the point of incoherence. It is a truly harrowing experience that I have not experienced with any other streaming service, and it seems so deliberate in its incompetence that I have no choice but to believe it was a feature specifically devised to inflict mass misery for the vicarious sadism of it. I will note however that while the Roku stick experienced some delays between the voice/sound track and the subtitles, it at least didn't suffer from anything as severe as on the Firestick. In which case there was zero buffering and the picture quality was actually quite good, though the Roku version of the app clearing the basic functionality threshold also brought attention to how the interface was lacking in some other important ways. If you don't know what you're looking for, the show descriptions are too short and vague to be helpful, and the search function only seems to understand movie titles: the lack of metadata pertaining to the shows genres/actors/directors does not allow for broad generic searches, which just makes navigation a slog as you realistically just have to go through the entire list manually one row at a time when trying to get an idea of what's available. The silver lining here is that this list is remarkably short as well, which doesn't do anything to help on the subscription retention side mind you, but it at least helps in mitigating the pain by not prolonging it pointlessly. I recommend avoiding the app altogether and to use a Roku device instead if you have one. And in case you're following Star Trek and do not have the luxury of choosing another streaming service, I unironically recommend drinking heavily.