User Interfaces for Streaming Video Apps Are Almost Universally Terrible ⇥ rollingstone.com

Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone:

The part of the streaming shell game that I’ve never been able to fully understand — and that has somehow gotten worse with each passing year and each new service debut — is just how bad the user experience is on all of them. It’s been 13 years since Netflix began offering streaming content, with Hulu and others soon to follow, yet the user interfaces consistently seem designed to make finding what you want to see — whether continuing a binge or discovering something new — a Herculean effort. Spend enough time toggling between the services, and you’ll want to quote Hall of Fame baseball manager Casey Stengel trying to make sense of the historically inept 1962 Mets: Can’t anybody here play this game?

Via Jason Snell, who writes:

And Sepinwall doesn’t even get into the playback interfaces themselves, which on the Apple TV are maddeningly inconsistent and fail to honor the (very nice) interface conventions of the platform.

I only hop between a handful of streaming media apps on my Apple TV, but they are each uniquely infuriating to an almost impressive degree. I did not know that it is, apparently, so difficult to make an adequate seek bar.