YouBet said:

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Hulu combining with Disney makes my head hurt just thinking about it. We switched from YTTV to Hulu about three months ago and I absolutely hate Hulus UI as is.

Just an absolute mess. Maybe they will improve it with this merger. Would like to see the beta before I cancel them and move back to YTTV though.

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I haven't tried Hulu Live yet, but I haven't been impressed YTTV's latest interface. It doesn't let you order your content by name anymore. It's just in a random order. And you have to take more steps to find it. Hate what they did with it. If the price keeps going up I may try Hulu.

If there is a way to order the channels on hulu I don't know what it is. Currently it is alphabetical on mine. For a few weeks the line up was local stations followed by everything else alphabetical, I really liked this.
That said I have been happy with hulu. Works well and is clear.

I haven't had it for a while, but I thought Fubo lets you customize the guide(easily using your PC if I remember correctly).

Odd. I always get a notification on the home page when A&M is playing.

Good to know. Thanks.

Agreed with you on that fig.

But I also agreed that YTTV made some bad UI changes/decisions lately. It was way easier to navigate a month ago. Still the best navigation/control, but not as good as it was. And no I'm not not used to the new interface yet. The old interface was just better.

Chipotlemonger said:

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Agreed with you on that fig.

But I also agreed that YTTV made some bad UI changes/decisions lately. It was way easier to navigate a month ago. Still the best navigation/control, but not as good as it was. And no I'm not not used to the new interface yet. The old interface was just better.

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What did they change because I was going to switch back tomorrow?

I despise Hulu Live. Have I told yall that yet? Well I'm telling you again.

I haven't noticed a significant change to the UI in the last few months. To what are you referring? I've noticed tweaks here and there, of course, but the overall flow of the UI has been the same as it's ever been for me.

TCTTS said:

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I haven't noticed a significant change to the UI in the last few months. To what are you referring? I've noticed tweaks here and there, of course, but the overall flow of the UI has been the same as it's ever been for me.

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Believe another poster mentioned it, going through the Library section is less structured now. Used to have a little more rhyme and reason to it I feel like, or maybe they just didn't hit you with as many subsections in the Library. That's about the best I can describe it.

Other than that, navigating the Live section is completely the same. Just the tweaks in the Library section have thrown me off a bit.

felte said:

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You are not restricted to the YTTV Live Guide channel order - you can can organize it however you like.

The custom sort lets you set the channel order and hide channels that are not of interest. IMO this level of customization is superior to any cable service I've ever had.

To configure the sort, you have to log-in to YTTV via a web browser on a PC. On the Live guide there's an option for Sort. On the Sort drop-down you can select Custom/Edit. The interface is a bit clunky, but you only need to suffer through the sort/favorites/hide setup once and the Custom sort is available on all devices. For example, instead of sorting by ABC title, I have my guide sorted by type of channel - Local/News, Sports, TBS/TNT/Fx, Discovery/Nat Geo/Animal Planet, Food/Reality, etc.

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Just tried this out and it's a nice feature/

Also, navigating the Library was way easier on my laptop than it has been on the TV. I still don't like all of the subsections, but get why they have them.

Okay good I'm not taking crazy pills. The library functionality (which is 80+% of our watching of things) is awkward, and yes seemingly an easy "fix." In quotation marks because they may not see it as needing fixing. I'm a completionist at heart, so that probably adds to my disdain for the way they set it up and especially with the recent changes.

i am ready for it all to implode and consolidate. Then I just buy a la carte per show/per movie what I want to watch. all from a single storefront.

yeah, I may have a wait, but I think we will get to a version of that for several of the players..

Chipotlemonger said:

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TCTTS said:

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I haven't noticed a significant change to the UI in the last few months. To what are you referring? I've noticed tweaks here and there, of course, but the overall flow of the UI has been the same as it's ever been for me.

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Believe another poster mentioned it, going through the Library section is less structured now. Used to have a little more rhyme and reason to it I feel like, or maybe they just didn't hit you with as many subsections in the Library. That's about the best I can describe it.

Other than that, navigating the Live section is completely the same. Just the tweaks in the Library section have thrown me off a bit.

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On an AppleTV, they have made it to where I have to hunt for our regularly recorded shows. Particularly shows that we record and watch every week. For some reason, they moved those from the default Library page to a "Most Viewed" page. Making it more annoying to find your most watched shows totally makes sense. /s

On the iPad, their UI looks like it's trying to mimic Netflix. It's got rows of programming, starting with "resume watching" which is a little weird for a live TV service.

Yes, it feels like these services are tinkering with the UI simply because they are bored and want to change it up a bit. There is only so much you can do with these UI's and I bet the Product people feel like they need to change it to "keep it fresh". It's over-engineering and forgetting that simpler is better.

My issues with Hulu sound like some of the issues YTTV and Apple have adopted which will be frustrating when I switch this weekend. Too many pages and then too many sections within those pages.


For those assessing what to pick here are my current gripes with Hulu in more detail:

Hulu Home Page Issues:
Live Now is the first row. The problem with Live Now is that it is extremely frustrating if you are looking for live sports because Live Now does not distinguish between games that were played 2 to infinity days ago vs what is actually live right now. For Hulu, Live Now just means what is currently airing on whatever channel they decide to serve up to you. IOW, it's not live TV.

Continue Watching is 4 rows down below the fold, so you have to scroll down to get to your current list of shows you are watching on Hulu.

Live TV Favorites (channels you watch a lot) is 9 rows down. See above.

Hulu Live Issues:
You can't customize anything like you can with YTTV. Anything you save or favorite is dumped into My Favorites. So, if you want to get to your "custom" TV guide, you first have to click My Favorites, then click Networks, and then it's presented as cards that do not show you what is on that channel. Therefore, this feature is unusable.

Hulu Live on AppleTV has no channel guide period, so you have to completely back out of the live show you are watching and go back to the Home page to find something else.

Performance:
The Live Guide (channel guide) is extremely slow to load. I'm on very fast internet that is hard wired to the TV and I get a loading bar when it goes to pull up the channel guide.

And now I'm having an issue I had with it the first time I was on Hulu Live a couple of years ago....it can't hold an HD signal. It flips in and out from SD to HD. That was the reason I switched to YTTV the first time and I never had issues with YTTV doing that. So this is now the second house I've lived in where Hulu can't hold an HD signal.

YouBet said:

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dmart90 said:

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Why Max Decided to Lose 'HBO' in Its Name https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-max-decided-to-lose-hbo-in-its-name-4d888c96
Thought it was an interesting read. Basically, they were afraid the HBO brand pigeonholed them. They were/are expanding to other genres and thought Max better conveyed that message. There is logic there; even if it is failed logic.

HBO = excellent programming. Everyone knows that. Would have been much easier to sell customers on we're expanding what HBO vs memoryholing an iconic brand IMHO.

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Agreed. That is amazingly dumb logic. Reading the interview the Marketing guy outsmarted himself.

HBO = iconic, gold standard programming with lord knows how many Emmys.
Cinemax = all the B level programming that also happens to be historically known for soft porn.

Marketing Guy: "It's a simple decision. You go with Cinemax and not HBO because people won't have the same equity in the HBO brand."

So, he picks the brand that has no equity to start with instead of the iconic brand that everyone automatically associates with gold standard quality. Uh, WTF?

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And to top it off, they didn't even put some of their top Cinemax TV series on Max.

The only other thing I can think here is that they know this is a huge gamble and they are sacrificing the MAX brand to the front lines of the Streaming war while holding the HBO brand in reserve.

Because something is going to give at some point. None of these options are making money and they are all getting more expensive. It's a big game of Streaming Highlander at this point. There can be only 2-3 core services at the end and he thinks that as well.

If that's what they are doing, then I can possibly understand this.

C@LAg said:

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i am ready for it all to implode and consolidate. Then I just buy a la carte per show/per movie what I want to watch. all from a single storefront.

yeah, I may have a wait, but I think we will get to a version of that for several of the players..

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More consolidations are coming, but I think the Charter/Disney arrangement will be more common for the cable/satellite providers.

People who truly want just a la carte can use Google, Apple or Amazon

Perfect.

As far as UI goes, I'm waiting for someone to figure out that making viewing preferences on a channel (prime, Hulu, Netflix, etc) much more customizable by the viewer is a huge boon.

I don't need their algorithms constantly asking me if I want to watch something I don't give a **** about. I want to deselect that from my portal and see only the crap I prefer.

oragator said:

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Figured I would just drop this here,

“I mean, it’s pretty easy, really. Simple as that.”pic.twitter.com/Q8De1IZyA7

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) January 2, 2024

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This convo would make zero sense to someone thirty years ago.

Plus I suspect it's fake. I've seen a video with a woman having almost the exact same talk.

superunknown said:

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"We have a lot of shht on this product that doesn't stand up to the HBO name. What should we do about it?"

"Let's just call it Max. That way we don't have to worry about it."

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I had HBO streaming and now can't get it on my Smart TV

it's the weirdest thing. so i have to watch the Dolphins Season of Hard Knocks through Amazon Prime