These days I don't spend much time navigating the interfaces of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, or Apple's TV app... I use
WatchAid as a front end to all of them. It does sort of the same job as Apple's TV app, but I find the TV app far too structured - Apple thinks I should watch things in a certain way (e.g. I've bought a handful of Looney Tunes cartoons - the TV app really wants me to watch them in order, one time each - but they're
cartoons, there's no continuity to follow), as well as offering "helpful" suggestions of new things on the
same front screen alongside the shows I'm currently watching.
Anyway, for watching episodic "television" on most of the streaming services, WatchAid is
very lightweight - you search for shows (one time, or at your whim) and add them, then it gives you a front screen with a simple grid of thumbnails (one for each show you've added), with an unwatched count badged on each show. If there are any shows that have gotten new episodes recently, they list in a separate group at the top initially, to stand out more (there's also an "Upcoming" page, which mostly replaces the #-of-unwatched-episodes badge with a count of days until the next episode will be released). Click on any show and get a simple
text list of episodes (for the season you've watched most recently, with tabs at the top for each season). Each episode has a "watched" marker next to it, which you can toggle on/off at your whim. The app will come back next time to the episode after the last one you watched. There's a thumbnail for the episode in the corner, along with a synopsis/setup (small enough to easily ignore if you want to be surprised), and buttons to take you to each app where you can watch that episode (iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, DirectTV, etc.); the buttons take you directly to watching the episode in the app of your choice (I think it works with a list of what streaming apps you've installed). And for iTunes, it'll tell you how much the episode would cost to buy. And, if you hit the menu button a few times after the episode plays, to get out of Netflix or wherever, you end up in WatchAid with a dialog saying, e.g., "Would you like to mark Jessica Jones Season 1 Episode 5 as watched?". Easy to watch in whatever order you want, even easier to watch in episode order. And if you add a show you've already watched a few seasons of elsewhere, once you start marking a bunch of episodes as watched, it'll ask, e.g. "Would you like to mark all of Season 1 as watched?".
I have hope that Apple's TV app will eventually become more compelling to me. Until then, WatchAid works quite well for keeping my place in the shows I'm watching, letting me know when new episodes are available, and easily queuing up episodes when I want to watch, rather than navigating through each streaming app's interface separately.
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I have yet to see this myself, but I actually preferred the ATV3 menus to the pre-update ATV4 menus. It was annoying to have to scroll up and down to find where it put "My List" this time.
Very much this! It was annoying to have to play hide and seek to find
the list of stuff I've already said I want to watch. Also not a fan of scrolling lists that wrap around. I'd like to see each of the available categories/shows
once, thanks. I know how scroll backwards and forwards - at least put a very noticeable "---- this is the end / this is the start ---" separator line in there, so I can see everything once without "wondering if I've been here already." As well, the preview is huge, and takes up so much space that could be used to give me more context about where I am in the whole collection of things. And they seem to value pretty-looking smooth transitions between titles and preview images more than they value providing useful information quickly - so, if I'm a ways back from the screen and relying on the large title to see what a show/movie is, rather than trying to read the name off the thumbnail image in the list, I have to wait for each title to slowly, beautifully, fade in at the top of the screen, just to find that it's something I don't care about and can go to the next one (rinse/repeat).
