Apple Podcast Feeds On Apple TV Are Much Slower / Less Reliable To Refresh Than On My Mac's Apple Podcast App

[jamesmcnee]

I use my home theatre / Apple TV to stream video, to listen to music from my iTunes, and to listen to Podcasts.

Recently it seems the Apple TV app is slow / wonky to refresh pods.

All my "podcast management" -- like subscribing -- is done on my Mac and the Mac's podcast app. The Apple TV Podcast app is just a dumm player.

Finally this morning I remembered to take note of the issue

Today I turned on and rebooted my Apple TV and went to the podcast app.

There were no new podcasts on the Apple TV. I did a few things around the apartment then sat down at my computer. I didn't force refresh feeds or anything and the Mac's Apple Podcast app showed 11 (eleven) podcast new "Today."

So I grabbed my camera, went to my Home theatre / Apple TV app and now 1 (one) podcast shows.

These two images are within a minute of each other. Sure some of the podcasts are obscure but others are pretty mainstream -- NYT, FT, Vox Media, ....

I'm sure that through the course of the day the Apple TV app will catch up, still something is strange and it is a pain in the ass to get your "morning briefing" at noon.

And there doesn't seem to be a pattern -- today's "News Brief" might be slow to show on the Apple TV but tomorrow it will be there at 5:30 am.

I use Apple Podcast on my Mac and Apple Podcast on my Apple TV -- whatever feeds I get come from / through / because of / ... Apple -- but one is "up to date" and the other takes hours.

The podcast app is the one built in to my tvOS -- Apple TV 4th gen 1080p 32 GB, tvOS 16.6

On my MAC again the built in Apple app -- macOS 12.6.7, Apple's app: Podcasts 1.1.0

Any thoughts?

Thanks

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Since you are basically at Apple's mercy to put some programming expertise on the "hobby" device app, the wait for efficiency gains may be LONG!

So my advice is to get it playing on the Mac and Airplay it to AppleTV. Then, all of what you like about the Mac's handling of them is available to you.

Option #2: you can also force a fresh sync by rebooting the AppleTV. A reboot should make it check in with the "mothership" (both cloud and its "mother" Mac) and present whatever is new. Yes, it is aggravating to reboot regularly just to get something to work as you think it should, but workaround options are increasingly common with modern Apple... as "just works" seems to be fading into history.

Option #3 (maybe): is there other podcast apps on AppleTV? I haven't checked in a long time. If there is, perhaps try something other than Apple's app. It wouldn't be the first app where someone else's is better.

There are many AppleTV bugs. My current "favorite" comes from ripping music to my Apple Music library. Put new songs in an existing playlist you might have sorted by song title (alphabetically) and it will not show up in the order it shows in the Mac playlist. Instead, it will be at the bottom of the playlist on AppleTV. The only way I've found to fix this is duplicate the playlist (effectively creating a new playlist as far as AppleTV is concerned) and then sync the new one to AppleTV. Then all songs are in the right order... until you add some more songs.

Another: when I try to find a song in cover flow mode, the "latest & greatest" AppleTV and tvOS seems to jump 2 (songs) at a time. If my desired song is in the right order, I can get to it to play it. If not, I have to start a nearby song playing, then skip ahead or back to get to the song I want to hear. It used to cover flow each song individually.

Even more??? A few days ago, it was discovered that the sleep by X minutes (inactivity) setting will make an AppleTV playing music go to sleep mid-play. For example, if that is set to 15 minutes, playing a music playlist will cause the AppleTV to sleep at 15 minutes. Play video or podcasts and it doesn't do this. It's just a Music playing issue.

Solution to all such issues: Get it going on a Mac and then Airplay it to AppleTV. OR, for music anyway, bypass AppleTV in a Receiver-based setup by airplaying to the Receiver.

Fun! Fun! I miss "just works" Apple.

 

[jamesmcnee]

Thanks again Darryl,

I thought too that a reboot would force the refresh and for a while it did. These days ... not so much!

Like you I haven't looked at other podcast apps in a while. Maybe I should give it a look.

I'm so glad you mentioned the songs showing up in wonky order. I can't believe Apple does that and for me to explain the problem to other people would make me sound crazy!

I fear you and I could sit there and yell at each other about this stuff for hours!

I know Apple is now just a phone company these days still; iTunes is bad and our Apple TVs ....!

Oh My