I watched some of Apple’s recent shows using…different methods than the official app and I believe they’re making some of the best content out there, currently. Shows like Severance and For All Mankind are masterpieces and they give me the SciFi fix I desperately needed.
So I’ve decided to bite the bullet and get a subscription - after all, you should support the creators you’re really invested in, right?
Watching content on their platform is so painful - it’s one of the worst experiences I ever had. If you want to watch the shows in a browser, you need to use Microsoft Edge on Windows because that’s the only browser which comes with Playwright DRM - and it only works if you have a HDCP 2.2-capable screen. If you don’t have that, the content gets served in 480p with a low bitrate. Might as well just put in a VHS at this point.
There’s another alternative: The official Windows 11 app you can get from the store. It is indeed capable of serving you UHD streams…if it wants to. All episodes that are age-rated to 16+ currently don’t work, because they forgot to implement an age verification mechanism and pressing play doesn’t do anything at all. According to their forums, that even seems to happen on MacOS in some cases, so they really messed up the most important thing of their own streaming platform: Pressing Play to watch an episode.
Even if you’re lucky and you’re watching a show that isn’t age-restricted, they serve the content in the language your Apple account has been set to when you’ve created it by default. So every time you open an episode, you have to start it and switch the audio to English. If you go to your account settings to change the language it tells you that your subscription needs to end before you can do that. So you have to wait four weeks or a whole year to change the default language, depending on the subscription model.
Adding to that, sometimes the video streams just freeze, the audio doesn’t play at all or the app straightup crashes in the middle of a stream.
I have rarely seen a platform messing up the user experience this badly. It’s as if Apple doesn’t even want you to watch their own content. I’ve decided to not renew my subscription and procure the episodes from other sources. I wanted to give you money, Apple. But you fucked up.
Maybe you’re not noticing the drop in resolution? They’re definitely not delivering their content in UHD, but they might be streaming proper 1080p if you have an HDCP-capable monitor, I don’t know.
For me, it’s a really bad experience. They’re just giving me 480p in Firefox, regardless of the operating system used.
Have you tried a user-agent switcher? Trick their website into thinking you’re using Safari on MacOS?
Didn’t think of that, thank you! But nope, that doesn’t make a difference. In Firefox, I get a stream like this and the drop in resolution and bitrate is definitely noticeable.
I took that screenshot on my 4K monitor.
Nah, if it was 480p, I would notice. I’m not 98 years old with cataracts.
Some people just don’t notice low resolution, don’t take this as a personal offence. :D
This is funny. I live in an area that’s pretty remote, and my internet speed is sometimes very shit, so I never realized I’m getting fucked on my picture quality by using firefox.