Olympic Channel

Regardless of the TV deals meaning you have to have a subscription to the Olympic Channel (nightmare for cable/cord cutters), it has a fair bit of content. I just wish they had more recordings of recent events like the 2019 curling event or the table tennis test for Tokyo 2020.

Let’s go through the good first: Content includes not only interesting originals, but access to world wide events you normally don’t get to see. The World Beach Games, for example. The developers and channel in general seem really friendly and frequently respond to concerns or comments, which is more than 85% of developers nowadays. The app is also perfect for worldwide sports news that is also usually hard to find. And of course, it’s the best place to get news about upcoming Olympics or watch your favorite moments from old ones. Now the bad: The app can be confusing to navigate sometimes. For example, I wanted to watch replays from the skateboarding events during the Beach Games. I managed to find a replay page for it, but there were no videos besides ads for other shows or news articles. The video player itself needs work too: when I’m watching a replay of a 3-20 hour event, it’s hard to find the sports I want to watch if it’s a long replay, such as day 4 of the Beach Games or the Olympics. I usually end up skipping past the beginning and either go insane trying to scan to the moment it starts only to overshoot by 30 minutes, or just accept it and skip the first half. I’d recommend following YouTube’s example: have buttons that allow you to skip back and forth 10 seconds or so. Better yet, install a chapter button that lets you skip to specific events within the video. Overall, I love this app! It just needs a little work.

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I want really badly for the app to work fantastically because it’s a great concept but I think it could be set up to be more user-friendly and easier to navigate. This app does an extremely poor job at loading the videos/episodes (but online it loads very quickly), and then it glitches (pretty consistently). When I try to exit out of full screen of the video, it shows the bottom half of the page on the top half of my screen, and the other half of my phone screen is black. The ideas are there but the execution isn’t very good. The app has some minor glitches and loads very slowly. I’d say focus on the performance issues because I think if the videos load faster and the glitches disappear it would be an incredible alternative to the website, but right now I‘ve decided to use the internet instead of the app because it is a lot quicker and easier. :)

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I started watching their original show “All Around” on the AppleTV. It features American, Russian and Chinese gymnasts, all speaking in their native language. While I don’t expect that everything should be in English, I do expect that if there’s a closed caption/subtitles option in the app, that should actually work. And it did...for about two minutes. I downloaded the iPhone app to see if it was just a bug with the AppleTV app. Unfortunately, I couldn’t even test that because the iPhone app won’t load the videos. It’ll load the ads just fine (surprise...) but all three episodes just show a spinning loading graphic. And on top of these bugs, when watching on the AppleTV, the audio would just stop for 10–15 seconds at a time. (Another time subtitles would’ve been helpful...) UPDATE: Now I’m getting audio but the video is frozen! Great app!🙄

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Heaven forbid that you start watching a show, leave, come back, and want to pick up where you left off. There is no way to resume playback after leaving the app or returning to the app’s menu. No captions. No fast forward. No rewinding.