Couldn’t decide between the Game Room or Cafe Society, but since this is basically a gripe I’ll put it here. Plus, I can swear more.
Why does Prime make it so fucking hard to watch a football game? I like to watch games on delay so I can skip commercials, long official replays, etc. But Prime doesn’t show the footage I’m skipping (or rewinding through), so I basically just have to guess when the commercials are over.
And when I exit the app, it doesn’t remember where I was, so I have to blindly and tediously fast forward or rewind until I stumble on the approximate spot.
Why can’t football be just as easy and intuitive to navigate as every other program on Prime?
And then there’s the whole outrage of having to endure commercials in the first place on a platform for which I’m paying a premium.
My wife dismisses these as first world complaints, and they surely are. But still … what the fuck, Prime?
I should have clarified, I am watching it on a TV, streaming Prime through a Roku. Every other Prime program works fine, but for some reason the football interface is just shit.
Yes. Yes, it is. I am so glad there was only one game we wanted to watch. It was a pain in the ass to set up and no good way to skip through the nine gazillion ads.
I guess I just don’t quite get the concept of on-demand streaming as it pertains to sports. If I have on-demand streaming why can’t I demand a game between two teams of my choice?
My initial guess would be some of those nifty features may be patented by other streaming service companies and Amazon is trying its best not to infringe. You may recall all the legal battles between Samsung and Apple over smart phone IP.
But Amazon deploys those “nifty features” on every other thing on their platform.
If I’m watching, say, “The Outlaws” and want to rewind to a certain point, I can see still images of the action in reverse until I see the moment I want, then hit play and I’m there. But if I want to do the same during a football game, the image stays frozen on wherever I paused it and I have to blindly guess where I’m rewinding to.
I don’t have specific knowledge, just guessing as a software developer.
It might have something to do with it being a live ongoing event? Hard to skip to an index 37% into an event when you haven’t defined the end point yet?
All that being said, Hulu also screws up my saved point if I exit the app and then try to resume a show I was watching. So maybe Amazon has the same bug.
I’m guessing it’s to make sure we see the ads - you can’t see any stills with games that are already over, either. I don’t know how much Amazon paid for the rights to Thursday Night Football, but I’m sure it wasn’t cheap, and there’s also the salaries for all the other people involved with it, both on- and off-air.
But my biggest gripe is the video quality looks like pre-Hidef. Why am I paying for what looks like a VHS recording? Nothing else on Prime is that bad.
My complaint is that the Prime app keeps sending my phone notifications for Thursday Night Football. I do not, and will never, want to watch football or sports of any variety. Yes, I can turn off notifications completely, but some of the other ones are useful. I don’t think there’s a way to disable just sports notifications.
I can see now why they’re so persistent. They only make money back on the advertisements. They already paid for the programming, so me not watching it costs them money.
I have always assumed that watching anything live via streaming means watching just like in antediluvian times, before even VCRs existed. This is why I would never even consider getting one of those live streaming packages like Hulu live or YouTube plus or whatever the fuck they’re called.
That’s strange. I thought the quality looked extra-sharp. But that is the only good thing I can say about it. Perhaps I’m just a grumpy old man, but I do not want to watch sports on an app. I have been watching TNF, but I’m offended by the idea of it. Our biggest TV (the one we usually watch games on) isn’t “smart,” and isn’t connected to a stick or any other device to make it smart. So, we watch on the TV in our bedroom, which is fine if it’s only me and my wife.
And I agree with the OP, fast-forwarding through commercials is frustrating. (but better than watching the damn things)
Anything else we stream from Amazon or Netflix is fine. But TNF gets a lot of large pixilization, low refresh rate, and generally low resolution even when it isn’t glitchy.
I’d be pissed if I didn’t have prime. It was bad enough when TNF started out on NFL Network (even though we got that as part of our sports cable package). (then Fox started carrying it, so I guess enough people complained).
We’re already watching the endlessly repeated stupid assed commercials, we shouldn’t have to pay again for sports.
I’ve noticed that the picture is of varying quality. It can be good but it can also be low quality and sometimes stalls. I assume they can’t handle the number who stream it. Football probably exceed their other offerings on prime and they are having trouble.