When there's a Star Trek running, I subscribe to Paramount+ via the Apple TV+ channel instead of directly, despite it costing a touch more, just to avoid having to use Paramount's official app (instead, one uses the Apple TV app and plays media with the stock tvOS player). It's absurd how much that improves the experience.

It plays inside the AppleTV app?

I hooked Peacock to the Apple TV app, and while it shows my next playing episode, launching from the Apple TV app just launches the Peacock app, which feels rather pointless.

You have to subscribe with the Apple TV+ channel specifically for it to play in the Apple TV app (confusing, I know). Not all services offer a TV+ channel, unfortunately.

Hmm... I guess I'll check into that next time and pay more attention. I subscribed to Peacock+ through a bundle offer with Apple TV+, and went through Apple to trigger the purchase. It forced me over to Peacock to make an account there and other than billing it seemed totally separate.

If you have a pihole or something that blocks ads/tracking for your entire network, try configuring it to exclude to your Apple TV. My Paramount+ app went from crashing daily to no crashes in many months.

Technically, you could also configure the pihole to allow the specific hosts that the Paramount+ app needs to access. However, I found that there were many hosts, and they also change from time to time, so it can be annoying to keep them updated when the app starts crashing again.

I don't know if the other people complaining have a pihole (or equivalent), but I do not.

Paramount plus is one of the worst apps I've ever used. It's so bad that I can only assume they tried as hard as possible to be is unusable. Unstable, slow, and lots of things just don't work right.

What gets me is the "play/pause" button behavior on a firestick remote. How many presses of play/pause would you think it takes to pause then resume playing? 2? Oh, no. Its 4! Pressing play/pause on the remote brings up the UI, like a mouse-over on some crappy web-player. You have to hit pause twice to actually pause the video. Then play again brings up the UI, then you have to hit it again to play again.

And don't even get me started on the times where the app opens and plays OK. Then you go to ff/rw and all it will let you do is pause. So you have to re-start the app to get control. Then it forgets where you are.

My favorite is the "sorry, we can't play this" just randomly out of nowhere in the middle of an episode. You were playing it just fine, what happened?

And, of course, the crashes. I don't think I've ever seen an app crash this much. It makes me very worried for the codebase.

Another big issue with the fire tv is that it just refuses to work when there's no internet access. It just shows an error page you can't get out of. So I can't even play local content through VLC or Jellyfin.

It really is. I cancelled my subscription recently because streaming in the app rarely worked. The only way to watch anything is either download it first if I'm watching on my tablet or use Chromecast to cast via the app on my phone. It was the same bad experience across Google TV, Android and iOS devices.

I recall it playing the same ad repeatedly during commercial breaks. I think i once watched the same ad 5 times in a row.

Later I subscribed to paramount+ via amazon, and said goodbye to the glitches.