I'd be curious why Amazon's Prime app has such horrible performance compared to literally every other streaming service, on WebOS at least (on a relatively recent LG OLED). They're all doing more or less the same thing, as far as I can tell as a user at least, yet just moving the focus around in Amazon's streaming app takes 0.5 second while it's instant in other apps. The bandwidth for actual streaming seems the same as the others, so videos start streaming much faster, but the UI is seemingly doing something very wrong, and I don't understand how they could have gotten it so wrong.
Amazon are bad at consumer software, with the exception perhaps of the kindle. Emphasis on consumer, because they have fantastic enterprise/cloud engineers.
They have, frankly, some of the worst UI/UX design of any company in the same spaces that they exist in. Look at even their store listings, it’s a complete mess of information sprawled over the pages.
They do not optimize for performance or have a culture of squashing UI bugs unless it’s measurably stopping conversion for them.
Hell there’s even been times I’ve reported html issues to their teams and been asked to provide the CSS fixes to them to integrate in.
I've noticed this as well. My best guess is either low hardware or just a bad solution.
If they planned to use a unified codebase for Prime app, they likely went with something HTML/CSS-based, which would explain the performance issues. I could be wrong, but it's just a hunch I have.
If there was other apps we use that had the same issue, I'd chalk it up to hardware too, but maybe they simply don't test it on representative hardware? That might explain it.
> they likely went with something HTML/CSS-based, which would explain the performance issues
Not sure, the web browser in the TV seems to handle things just fine, and much faster than Amazon's app, so I don't think HTML/CSS is to blame here. Probably shit architecture/software design, as usual.
I would assume they hire competent engineers, so it’s probably something intentional, like an invasion of privacy/user telemetry. At least it doesn’t have AWS’s UX.
Could be. Interesting anecdote on that, we're using the Vodafone TV app on the very same TV, and that app you can toggle "send analytics to Vodafone" on or off in the settings, which of course defaults to on.
At one point I toggled it to off, and suddenly the whole app became as fast as all the others, while when the toggle is on, the application is as slow and laggy as the Amazon one. So that might actually very well be the reason.
I'm still astonished how poorly optimized the YouTube app is/has always been on Apple TV. It's fucking wild how slow they can make it move about a bunch of rectangular icons, the same unit that can run honest to goodness videogames (if simple ones).
Though I suppose my XBox Series X can run Halo Infinite at 4K/60hz (with a ton of asterisks) and still chokes on the main menu which is also coincidentally a bunch of rectangles.
Huh, that's strange, the YouTube TV app is for us one of the more performant ones, although the UX leaves a lot to be desired. But at least when you move right/down/left/up it does so within 50-100ms, whereas with Amazon's app it sometimes take almost a whole second for the focus on actually move around.
Really it's the only Apple TV app that I regularly have issues with! Sometimes it opens to just a blank gray screen, sometimes you start a video and sits there waiting to start endlessly and doesn't play anything, sometimes it won't send the audio to connected Homepods for mysterious reasons, and even when it works it is so unbelievably slow.
The Nebula app also isn't great, but at least it functions, even if it too is slower that molasses in January.
I think I've once had it freeze and I had to restart the device - but when it is working it is quite snappy. I don't even think its the device - we upgraded from quite an old Apple TV model to a new one and it was equally usable on both.
One other thing that the Amazon Prime app does on LG TVs(and I apologize if you haven't noticed this earlier) - if you are using optical audio output, there's a horrible delay between audio and video, which doesn't really exist in any other app. It's been reported for years, and Amazon isn't willing to address it in any way.
I am at a point where I just installed Bazzite on a mini-itx PC and bought a gyroscope mouse (also called a flymouse) and use steam big picture mode.
Access to a proper browser (with adblock) and a proper keyboard more than makes up for the UX problems.
I just wish modern browsers had the (old pre-chromium) Opera browser style of spatial navigation, gyroscope mouses work well enough but spatial navigation is the main feature I miss since I switched off old Opera
As someone that used to work on a TV app I wasn't surprised when focus issues were the first thing mentioned. It sounds trivial but it takes a surprising amount of testing and bug fixing to get it right.
I remember one time there was a random Philips TV that just kept crashing when the user tried to do "right" on the last item in a horizontal menu. The client kept testing on this TV, and we spent 3 weeks because my team lead at the time wouldn't trust me that I needed the TV to solve it.
They finally agreed to send us the TV. Solved the issue in 10mins.
Who do I send my TV to to figure out why launching the DR app (Danish public broadcaster) on my Philips TV will power on the PlayStation and then crash?
Normally I'd just use the AppleTV, but the kid stole the AppleTV to watch cartoons in the guest bedroom. I continuously surprised that a 10 year old AppleTV still a better option than using the apps that comes with the TV.
Honestly I haven't look into it much, I just thought it was funny that this one app would boot the PlayStation... and then crash. None of the other apps does this. To me it's just a funny interaction that should even be possible in my mind. In the end I hooked the AppleTV up again so I don't have care.
The "low powered hardware" is why I always buy an external streaming device. I started with the original Apple TV, then a bunch of Roku variants, when Roku got unreliable, I went back to modern Apple TVs. They just work better. I've had sales guys in stores get really pushy with me about "you dont need that", one time I finally had to say to one of them "I get it, I don't care that its already in the TV, I'm buying the external box, either from you or from another store so stop arguing and just sell it to me".
As an outsider, the fact that cross-device stuff just works in apple's ecosystem is probably the biggest thing I'm jealous of. It's crazy that something as simple as screen casting is still hit or miss when it comes to (android / linux) <-> (web os / chromecast / fire stick)
I just bought binding of Isaac on Apple Arcade for my iPad, a very good surprise was not that the purchase is valid for my Apple TV and iPhone, but that the saves are synced, even in mid session!
I always found most tv apps have some performance issues. I've seen netflix, prime, even youtube crash, lag, or have some issues now and then that just made me think that maybe tvs are just not powerful. Don't even want to talk about Disney+, HBO, or Hulu.
Then I got an appletv+ subscription, and was pleasantly surprised it performed far better, on an android tv even. I wonder if it's beyond just the company standards for performance, and that the lower compatibility for porting between swift and the android sdks compared to idk react components or flutter, forced them to start from scratch for performance on android tvs.
TV's are optimized around decoding video, At least they can generally do this at full speed, this is coupled with the cheapest cpu the manufacturer can find. Even this would be manageable, There have been great UI's on weaker hardware. But then they want to program everything in html/javascript/css 7 layer lasagna stacks, this is where things start to get bad. Then the marketing team gets their slimy hands in and proceed to stuff the telemetry in until full. It is still "technically" usable, but nobody is enjoying the experiance. Package it up and sell it to some rube as a "Smart" TV.
My 2 cents: if you are big enough and the competition isn't as strong, users will give you a pass on some performance issues as long as they get the content they want.
I enjoy how the website has overridden my browsers scroll bar to use it's own, significantly lower contrast and less visible one, making it much harder to tell where in the article I am. My browser already has a good dark mode scroll bar...
Another thing is lead time. I built an app (https://signagesync.app/) to "multi-chromecast" websites and videos to Android TV, macOS, Windows and hopefully Samsung TV as well.
"Hopefully", because it took me literally 2 months waiting for the reviewer to test my app after it's submitted (to be fair, they did say "expect 6-8 weeks" upfront). They found some issues (crashes), so it was rejected, but I lost interest in resubmitting.
> On TV, input works very differently. Users navigate with a remote. Movement is discrete. Every interaction requires intention. Each action is one step in a sequence. That difference changes everything.
I just don't want to read articles that are written by LLMs. If there was something you earnestly learned that you think other engineers could benefit from, use your own words to tell us. It's lazy and disrespectful to hand an audience a massive sloppy blob which reeks of GPT 5 and frame it as something you "learned".
Yes this is a waste of time. It’s actually a hard engineering problem! There are very few engineers who build for TV compared to desktop or mobile. The challenges are totally different. There are still some good human-written articles out there.
I write all my articles by hand for the first draft and the final polish. I do use LLMs in between to try to get a clearer message (to what I find appropriate).
I understand if you don't want to read it, but there is nothing dishonest about this article. I've lived through what I wrote with those 3 apps. Take it as you wish and have a good day.
Does anyone have experience with professional Brightscript dev? I'm fascinated by it as a web developer looking to find a new niche, but it's like impossible to get into. Seems like every major streaming platform is going to need some experts for the foreseeable future given the install base of Roku at this point, and LLMs are horrible at it.
I'd be curious why Amazon's Prime app has such horrible performance compared to literally every other streaming service, on WebOS at least (on a relatively recent LG OLED). They're all doing more or less the same thing, as far as I can tell as a user at least, yet just moving the focus around in Amazon's streaming app takes 0.5 second while it's instant in other apps. The bandwidth for actual streaming seems the same as the others, so videos start streaming much faster, but the UI is seemingly doing something very wrong, and I don't understand how they could have gotten it so wrong.
Amazon are bad at consumer software, with the exception perhaps of the kindle. Emphasis on consumer, because they have fantastic enterprise/cloud engineers.
They have, frankly, some of the worst UI/UX design of any company in the same spaces that they exist in. Look at even their store listings, it’s a complete mess of information sprawled over the pages.
They do not optimize for performance or have a culture of squashing UI bugs unless it’s measurably stopping conversion for them.
Hell there’s even been times I’ve reported html issues to their teams and been asked to provide the CSS fixes to them to integrate in.
I've noticed this as well. My best guess is either low hardware or just a bad solution.
If they planned to use a unified codebase for Prime app, they likely went with something HTML/CSS-based, which would explain the performance issues. I could be wrong, but it's just a hunch I have.
> My best guess is either low hardware
If there was other apps we use that had the same issue, I'd chalk it up to hardware too, but maybe they simply don't test it on representative hardware? That might explain it.
> they likely went with something HTML/CSS-based, which would explain the performance issues
Not sure, the web browser in the TV seems to handle things just fine, and much faster than Amazon's app, so I don't think HTML/CSS is to blame here. Probably shit architecture/software design, as usual.
I would assume they hire competent engineers, so it’s probably something intentional, like an invasion of privacy/user telemetry. At least it doesn’t have AWS’s UX.
> like an invasion of privacy/user telemetry
Could be. Interesting anecdote on that, we're using the Vodafone TV app on the very same TV, and that app you can toggle "send analytics to Vodafone" on or off in the settings, which of course defaults to on.
At one point I toggled it to off, and suddenly the whole app became as fast as all the others, while when the toggle is on, the application is as slow and laggy as the Amazon one. So that might actually very well be the reason.
I'm still astonished how poorly optimized the YouTube app is/has always been on Apple TV. It's fucking wild how slow they can make it move about a bunch of rectangular icons, the same unit that can run honest to goodness videogames (if simple ones).
Though I suppose my XBox Series X can run Halo Infinite at 4K/60hz (with a ton of asterisks) and still chokes on the main menu which is also coincidentally a bunch of rectangles.
Maybe rectangles are just really hard to draw.
Huh, that's strange, the YouTube TV app is for us one of the more performant ones, although the UX leaves a lot to be desired. But at least when you move right/down/left/up it does so within 50-100ms, whereas with Amazon's app it sometimes take almost a whole second for the focus on actually move around.
I don't think I've ever noticed any problems with the YouTube app on our Apple TV?
Really it's the only Apple TV app that I regularly have issues with! Sometimes it opens to just a blank gray screen, sometimes you start a video and sits there waiting to start endlessly and doesn't play anything, sometimes it won't send the audio to connected Homepods for mysterious reasons, and even when it works it is so unbelievably slow.
The Nebula app also isn't great, but at least it functions, even if it too is slower that molasses in January.
I think I've once had it freeze and I had to restart the device - but when it is working it is quite snappy. I don't even think its the device - we upgraded from quite an old Apple TV model to a new one and it was equally usable on both.
One other thing that the Amazon Prime app does on LG TVs(and I apologize if you haven't noticed this earlier) - if you are using optical audio output, there's a horrible delay between audio and video, which doesn't really exist in any other app. It's been reported for years, and Amazon isn't willing to address it in any way.
I am at a point where I just installed Bazzite on a mini-itx PC and bought a gyroscope mouse (also called a flymouse) and use steam big picture mode. Access to a proper browser (with adblock) and a proper keyboard more than makes up for the UX problems.
I just wish modern browsers had the (old pre-chromium) Opera browser style of spatial navigation, gyroscope mouses work well enough but spatial navigation is the main feature I miss since I switched off old Opera
https://blog.codinghorror.com/spatial-navigation-and-opera/
> Focus would get lost
An engineer from Netflix wrote a blog post in 2017 explaining how they handle LRUD input and focus: https://netflixtechblog.com/pass-the-remote-user-input-on-tv...
As someone that used to work on a TV app I wasn't surprised when focus issues were the first thing mentioned. It sounds trivial but it takes a surprising amount of testing and bug fixing to get it right.
I remember one time there was a random Philips TV that just kept crashing when the user tried to do "right" on the last item in a horizontal menu. The client kept testing on this TV, and we spent 3 weeks because my team lead at the time wouldn't trust me that I needed the TV to solve it.
They finally agreed to send us the TV. Solved the issue in 10mins.
Who do I send my TV to to figure out why launching the DR app (Danish public broadcaster) on my Philips TV will power on the PlayStation and then crash?
Normally I'd just use the AppleTV, but the kid stole the AppleTV to watch cartoons in the guest bedroom. I continuously surprised that a 10 year old AppleTV still a better option than using the apps that comes with the TV.
Did you try and look it up, or do any debugging? Does it crash with the HDMI unplugged from the Playstation? Playstation power unplugged?
Below is what 18 seconds of web searching led me to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/8u6hrm/why_does_turnin...
Honestly I haven't look into it much, I just thought it was funny that this one app would boot the PlayStation... and then crash. None of the other apps does this. To me it's just a funny interaction that should even be possible in my mind. In the end I hooked the AppleTV up again so I don't have care.
The "low powered hardware" is why I always buy an external streaming device. I started with the original Apple TV, then a bunch of Roku variants, when Roku got unreliable, I went back to modern Apple TVs. They just work better. I've had sales guys in stores get really pushy with me about "you dont need that", one time I finally had to say to one of them "I get it, I don't care that its already in the TV, I'm buying the external box, either from you or from another store so stop arguing and just sell it to me".
As an outsider, the fact that cross-device stuff just works in apple's ecosystem is probably the biggest thing I'm jealous of. It's crazy that something as simple as screen casting is still hit or miss when it comes to (android / linux) <-> (web os / chromecast / fire stick)
I just bought binding of Isaac on Apple Arcade for my iPad, a very good surprise was not that the purchase is valid for my Apple TV and iPhone, but that the saves are synced, even in mid session!
Absolutely. I do the same. IMO it's either Apple TV or Nvidia Shield. Everything else is hit or miss (likely miss).
From a developer's perspective, it's a nightmare to deal with such hardware.
I always found most tv apps have some performance issues. I've seen netflix, prime, even youtube crash, lag, or have some issues now and then that just made me think that maybe tvs are just not powerful. Don't even want to talk about Disney+, HBO, or Hulu.
Then I got an appletv+ subscription, and was pleasantly surprised it performed far better, on an android tv even. I wonder if it's beyond just the company standards for performance, and that the lower compatibility for porting between swift and the android sdks compared to idk react components or flutter, forced them to start from scratch for performance on android tvs.
TV's are optimized around decoding video, At least they can generally do this at full speed, this is coupled with the cheapest cpu the manufacturer can find. Even this would be manageable, There have been great UI's on weaker hardware. But then they want to program everything in html/javascript/css 7 layer lasagna stacks, this is where things start to get bad. Then the marketing team gets their slimy hands in and proceed to stuff the telemetry in until full. It is still "technically" usable, but nobody is enjoying the experiance. Package it up and sell it to some rube as a "Smart" TV.
My 2 cents: if you are big enough and the competition isn't as strong, users will give you a pass on some performance issues as long as they get the content they want.
TVs are NOT powerful. It’s like writing software for the Lunar rover.
I enjoy how the website has overridden my browsers scroll bar to use it's own, significantly lower contrast and less visible one, making it much harder to tell where in the article I am. My browser already has a good dark mode scroll bar...
This blog reads like it was written by ChatGPT.
Another thing is lead time. I built an app (https://signagesync.app/) to "multi-chromecast" websites and videos to Android TV, macOS, Windows and hopefully Samsung TV as well.
"Hopefully", because it took me literally 2 months waiting for the reviewer to test my app after it's submitted (to be fair, they did say "expect 6-8 weeks" upfront). They found some issues (crashes), so it was rejected, but I lost interest in resubmitting.
I'm sorry Dinko, but this ain't it.
> On TV, input works very differently. Users navigate with a remote. Movement is discrete. Every interaction requires intention. Each action is one step in a sequence. That difference changes everything.
I just don't want to read articles that are written by LLMs. If there was something you earnestly learned that you think other engineers could benefit from, use your own words to tell us. It's lazy and disrespectful to hand an audience a massive sloppy blob which reeks of GPT 5 and frame it as something you "learned".
Yes this is a waste of time. It’s actually a hard engineering problem! There are very few engineers who build for TV compared to desktop or mobile. The challenges are totally different. There are still some good human-written articles out there.
I write all my articles by hand for the first draft and the final polish. I do use LLMs in between to try to get a clearer message (to what I find appropriate).
I understand if you don't want to read it, but there is nothing dishonest about this article. I've lived through what I wrote with those 3 apps. Take it as you wish and have a good day.
Does anyone have experience with professional Brightscript dev? I'm fascinated by it as a web developer looking to find a new niche, but it's like impossible to get into. Seems like every major streaming platform is going to need some experts for the foreseeable future given the install base of Roku at this point, and LLMs are horrible at it.