18 September 2015

Food network without cable

We love the Food Network in my household. And while we still have a U-verse subscription and DVR, most of our TV watching these days is on-demand via iOS apps or Apple TV. (And...to a lesser extent...Amazon Video via iOS or Roku.)

Unfortunately, the Watch Food Network app is not great. It frequently drops when using AirPlay. It frequently crashes. Those problems would be mitigated some if it remembered your place and resumed playing from there, but it never does. To add insult to injury, trying to manually jump forward to where you were is frustrating. In the best case it makes you rewatch all the commercial breaks you’d already sat through, and you eventually find the place despite not having the help of a good scrubber UI. If it should crash, however, it sends you back to square one. There are episodes we haven’t finished watching because several attempts to resume failed.

The worst part is that our experience with this app is making us not want to watch Food Network at all.

Here’s the deal: We pay $12 a month for Hulu without commercials. We would watch enough Food Network, that we’d be willing to pay the same $12/month for just a Food Network subscription without commercials.

But...it would require an app on par with the other big streaming services. (e.g. I hear the people behind the MLB streaming service have helped out others in this department.) And it should allow downloading episodes for offline viewing.

And if anyone from Food Network reads this...while I have your attention... Why is there no way I pay you to watch Feasting on Asphalt?

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