Apple TV+ recommendation thread

It is the best for that. All I would really want out of it is like an Apple Music sub for movies. I would happily chuck a tenner a month at a nowtv-esque Apple Movie sub with older releases.

You missed the death scene then. Probably for the best, it was a bit emotional. RIP, Ted. :-(

It was definitely a thing they needed to make Apple One make sense. That I'm teetering on the brink suggests they're onto something. They just need critical mass on their content, just as Netflix eventually achieved. Pronbably need to acquire a studio or two for the back catalogues, too, which is surely on the cards.

That describes the vast majority of subscription services (yeah definitely including Apple). The only ones that actually seem to justify their own existence (in the UK) are Netflix, Prime, and Disney+ after they added Stars. Every single other one (ignoring specialist services, but even some of those are questionable) is solely a vanity or desperate and ill-guided profit-grubbing measure. Apple TV falls solidly into the vanity category - it does have a bunch of good (some mediocre), well-made shows on it, but you could probably watch all of them end-to-end in under 3 months, and given they like to give out 3 and 6 month trials...

Honestly the best thing about Apple TV is the picture quality/lack of compression artifacts/banding. I dunno what they're doing differently except it definitely uses more data than any other streaming service, so I guess they're just compression less. I fucking wish Prime and Netflix would have an option to do the same. Amazing how many 4K shows can end up looking a bit crap just because of compression even when it's not a bandwidth/WiFi issue.

Not in the UK it isn't. NowTV is 720p for £9.99, and an extra £5.99/month if you want 1080p. 4K isn't even available as an option, probably because Sky/NowTV are just profoundly bad at streaming tech (seriously, NowTV on PC relies on a separate client which uses Silverlight, something Microsoft basically abandoned about a decade ago, and it's other clients just don't work on a lot of machines).

Yeah Netflix's pricing is definitely excessive in terms of what you get at this point. They seem to think they've got a captive audience and can just ratchet up the price (as an aside, I was able to see this in fascinating detail by searching my email for Netflix bill-increase emails a while back, which lead to me cancelling them).

And yes, they are, in my experience, noticeably the worst quality because they use some kind of hardcore compression algorithm, which looks kinda okay at 1080p, albeit there's excessive banding, especially in dark scenes (even with HDR), and I thought looked okay at 4K until I got Apple TV, and went from watching an episode of Mythic Quest in 4K to some Netflix show (I forget what, but it was recent and 4K), and it was like "What the fuck is this? Is this even in 4K? Is my TV broken?". Sadly the TV was fine, and it was in 4K.

Prime is not much better quality-wise, and has worse shows, but it's £7.99 for a ton of random-ass benefits (obviously Amazon stuff delivered faster and usually free, but also weird shit like Deliveroo delivery being free over £25 if you hook up that to it) and includes 4K and doesn't seem to try to give me shit about "too many screens" (which Netflix has before). Also Prime sometimes has some fantastically random weird shit, like a documentary on the World of Darkness pen and paper RPGs (I will report back if it's any good) which were huge in the 1990s.

As noted I cancelled Netflix a couple of months ago because of the price (but someone else in the house has it now - albeit the lowest quality - which seems to be 720p).

Do people really want to see 30 hours of Obi-Wan riding his motorcycle?

So it's worth it?

Their basic 720P tier (I just grabbed a few months on a deal) looks a lot better than Netflix's lowest tier (Basic) on my 4K OLED.

Yeah the newest one isn’t a patch on the first two but it has a charm of its own. The first two are up there as well, if you haven’t watched them already. Bit old now, but still entertaining.

Just watched the first two episodes of The Afterparty. Quite entertaining so far. Will have a 8 episodes in total, 3 are out now.

I like the concept of this and the fact each episode sounds like it's filmed very differently.

Ah okay, that makes more sense! Looking forward to starting it

My missus is a big fan of both and forwarding her this has made her day