Forum Discussion

BobNBend's avatar
BobNBend
Spectator
3 years ago

Don't Bother with PlayOn Home

I took a year's subscription to the new PlayOn home PC based app.  It was/is a complete failure.  I could not use the PlayOn Cloud as we do not have cell service at my mountain home here in Oregon and it requires a phone or tablet.  The PlayOn home app also had a feature to schedule downloads during off peak traffic times for HughesNet, so I was excited to use it to reduce by daytime data usage.

PlayOn home is advertised to download streaming content directly to your PC - provided you have account credentials for each streaming source.  I have credentials for six different content providers, and none of them work very well.  I get about a 30 precent success rate overall for downloads that I schedule.  The app cannot handle some login procedures correctly (Mostly PBS and other 'free" providers where creds always get lost and cannot be remembered.)  It does not differentiate between no cost and premium content where a provider offers premium for pay (think Peacock), and "channel" browsing is extremely slow and not very smart.  But worst of all, many attempted downloads simply timeout due to satellite link delays or fail because the connection gets broken during download and cannot recover.  When this happens, the only available option is to reattempt the download the following night -- with the reattempt eating up a duplicate amount of your allowed bandwidth.  No reason is ever given for a failed download, so you have no idea how to remedy it.  Not impressed at all with this product.

PlayOn
  • maratsade's avatar
    maratsade
    Distinguished Professor IV
    3 years ago

    I didn't care for PlayOn Home either. I use PlayOn Cloud and that works very well, but of course, you need a phone or tablet.   

  • GabeU's avatar
    GabeU
    Distinguished Professor IV
    3 years ago

    I wouldn't bother with PlayOn Home, but PlayOn Cloud has worked nearly perfectly for me for a few years now.  I have a sizable and growing library of films and TV shows, including series and documentaries.  In that time I've had less than a half dozen instances of "glitches" in the mp4 files, and every time they've reimbursed the recording credits so that I could 'record' the item again.