I have many streaming services that I use both on my laptop and on the TV (which is a new LG). They all work fine except for Paramount, which seems to buffer continuously. Even getting to the app is an exercise in frustration, as I often get kicked out and have to try another time or two to get the bloody thing to load. It seems there are a lot of complaints about this online. Oddly enough, it works fine on my laptop.
The app is clunky to use, also, but that’s not my primary beef. Any ideas?
I don’t have Paramount+.
I do have Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime, and HBO Max.
HBO Max stutters horribly on every device we have except for one laptop. All of the others work perfectly on every device.
I have to wonder if HBO Max and Paramount+ use the same streaming software.
For what it’s worth, we have both Paramount Plus and HBO Max and both work fine on all of our devices.
My granddaughter has several favorite shows on Paramount+ and for the most part, they seem to work fine both at our house and at hers. Maybe try uninstalling the app, cycling the power on the devices, then reinstall? Other than that, I got nothing. Good luck!
I found that Paramount+ did not play well with my Pihole ad blocker. Many shows worked just fine, but other shows wouldn’t work at all. Whitelisting a few addresses wasn’t enough, because the addresses were often places I did want to block for other apps, and because the list seemed to constantly change.
Anyway, I turned off Pihole for the Roku, because the only things it was actually achieving were keeping the Roku from phoning home (good), and making Paramount+ very unstable (bad). Since turning off the ad blocker for the Roku, Paramount+ has worked much better.
I had these same issues with Paramount+ and HBO Max, then I switched to another internet provider (T-Mobile 5G)and haven’t had an issue since. I had been using my Verizon phones 5G hotspot for my whole home before and was having issues, which is one of the reason I switched. I suspected that Verizon was starting to throttle down my service since I was using over 250G of data a month on my unlimited plan.
I was going to mention this. We don’t subscribe to HBO Max anymore, but when we did for 6 months or so about a year ago I remember the interface being awful, to the point fast-forward and reverse were nearly unusable.
I have both, and I have noticed the user interfaces look nearly identical between the two apps. With all the streaming services now it wouldn’t surprise me if many of them are using the same basic app developed by some third party.
That said, I experience the problems @Chefguy described much more frequently with the Paramount+ app. Usually once the app is up and running it works fine for me, but more often than not when I try to start the app it kind of partly loads, then sits there for a while, and then crashes. I have to retry several times before it actually works.
Yeah, of all our streaming services, Netflix is far and away the most janky.
My guess is that people’s streaming experience is probably dependent on some sort of infrastructural quirks of where they live- I might live somewhere that the network path to Netflix goes through some high traffic router or something, and for you, it is HBOMax that goes through some less-than-optimal hops between them and you.
Still others have trouble with Paramount+, which has been absolutely rock-solid for me, for what that’s worth.
Exactly this. As I mentioned, it works fine on my laptop, so it’s not the building setup (comcast), but the smart TV doesn’t like it at all. Back in Portland, I don’t remember having this problem, but I was running it through Roku along with everything else. Eh, 1st world problems I guess.
There have been a few occasions when the app was being especially troublesome, when after wasting way too much time just trying to start the app I gave up out of frustration, opened it on my laptop instead, connected the laptop to the TV with an HDMI cable, and watched that way instead. But I really shouldn’t have to do that when there’s already an app for the TV.
I’m told Paramount+ works a lot better as an Amazon Prime subscription add-on than as a direct service. Maybe try switching over to that if it is an option.
I actually did sign up as an Amazon Prime add-on. And then when I tried to watch their content in the Prime app on my TV I got a message like “You can’t watch this content in the Prime Video app on this device.” I had to sign up for a CBS All Access* account, link it to my Amazon account, and watch in the CBS All Access / Paramount+ app on my TV.
*As it was called at the time.
That’s what I had to do. I first tried their own app on my PS4 (Where I do all my streaming). And it just kept buffering. So I switched to Amazon Prime and never had an issue.
Well, except that you can’t find all the titles on Amazon’s version. Like the Daily Show for example.
I recently dropped HBO Max in favor of Paramount+. Partly because I wanted to watch a lot of the new Trek series, mostly because the HBO app is so janky on my iPad (I watch a lot of stuff offline).
Apparently, Viacom hired all the engineers that weren’t good enough for HBO’s team to develop their app. Mother of God, does the Paramount+ app suck! Virtually every episode I download will stutter or balk partway through, following which the audio and video will be 2-3 seconds out of sync with each other. Only solution seems to be to delete the downloaded content and stream or re-download. Simply closing and re-opening the app doesn’t seem to work.
Yesterday I tried to download S1E4 of ST: Strange New Worlds. It showed up in my “Downloads” list, but with the symbol that indicates it is yet to be downloaded. Pressing this did nothing. Episode wouldn’t stream, either. Had to delete from my downloads folder, restart app, and re-download.
I know Netflix is kind of on the outs at the moment, but in my experience their app just works. No muss, no fuss. Would that the other services could achieve that level of functionality.
Adding in my story, which may have nothing to do with what you’re experiencing.
We have Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Hulu (bundled), HBOMax, Paramount+, Starz, and several other free channels.
Recently, we started having a problem where streaming, no matter the channel, would randomly and frequently drop. Or the sound would drop for a few seconds. I think this was happening much more frequently on 1 or 2 channels, but still occurred on several channels. My TV is not Smart, and we stream thru a Roku device, attached to the TV via HDMI cable.
So we bought a replacement Roku. As I was getting that hooked up, for some reason I just used another, new, HDMI cable that we had. That solved the problem, so the new Roku went back for a refund.
Again, may have nothing to do with your experience, but basic troubleshooting steps would have saved me a little hassle, with the back-and-forth. Hope your situation is sorted sooner rather than later.
Fwiw I’ve had no issues with Paramount+ on my Roku. It seems pretty seamless and haven’t noticed any problems.
What Internet speeds do y’all have? I could see this being an issue where Paramount+ (and also HBOMax) use higher bitrates, whether due to them just being less compressed in general, or due to faulty detection of your Internet speed.
Though the problem being on your TV and not a PC would suggests a bad TV app, or at least an older one that hasn’t been updated to handle new stuff. Still, the problem with the app could be that it incorrectly detects your Internet speed.
If there are any options in either of them to explicitly choose a quality setting for your videos, that might help resolve the problem.
Well seems I spoke too soon. Tonight I have been getting nothing but problems from Paramount. I went to watch an episode of Evil tonight and am only getting a “This content is unavailable right now. Please try again later.” message. Other episodes play, and that one works fine on my phone but won’t play on the TV. And now since last night it seems they have completely removed the series Air Disasters from their service. Was watching it yesterday with no issue. 
114 mbps download
5.87 mbps upload
Shouldn’t be an issue. Also, this is a new LG OLED TV that updates itself when necessary.