Once upon a time, the only streaming app people really had to think about was Netflix, which is still the one most worth your money. Nowadays, every studio with even a shallow library has its own app, and it’s becoming hard to keep up. And not all streaming apps are created equal. Netflix has had the most time to figure things out, so you can usually count on it to at least work when you load it up. Others are busted to the point where it feels like the studios should pay you to watch them.
One streaming app in particular is so bad I have to sound off: Paramount+. The UI for Paramount+ has sucked for far too long, and it could become a bigger problem soon.
Paramount+ simply doesn’t work
The load times are unbearable
Paramount+ has a lot of programming worth watching. All the Star Trek shows and movies are there. The RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise lives there. Paramount+ is where you can watch all the Dexter series, including the surprisingly good revival show. Series like Tulsa King, Mayor of Kingstown, 1883, and 1923 have all earned themselves large followings. It’s just a shame you have to wade through the terrible UI to get to them.
The biggest problem with Paramount+ is simply that it’s way too slow. To prove I’m not exaggerating, I did a little experiment and timed how long it took me to go from selecting one of several streaming apps on my TV to actually watching an episode of a TV show. In each case, when I got to the home screen, I hit down on the remote, then two over, and then watched whatever I landed on. With Netflix, I was watching TV in 33 seconds. HBO Max and Disney+ took 42 and 43 seconds, respectively. For Paramount+, this should-be-simple process took one minute and 15 seconds.
In the span of your whole life, one minute and 15 seconds is not a long time. But if you like TV, this gets grating, especially when you know it doesn’t have to be this way. Why does it take Paramount+ over double the time Netflix needs to even load the home page? Why is there a delay whenever you try to navigate from show to show? There’s something so incredibly unsatisfying about clicking a button on your remote and then having to wait a second for Paramount+ to register the input, like the UI isn’t listening to you.
And keep in mind that I never left the homepage for this experiment. If you want to use the search function or browse some of the different categories, be prepared for longer wait times and sluggish responses. A good UI should get you where you’re going with as little fuss as possible, but Paramount+ drags everything out. I know I sound melodramatic, but I’m at the point where I dread having to open the app.
Different service, same problems
But worse on Paramount+
In general, streaming services have gotten more annoying over the years, and some of my complaints about Paramount+ aren’t native to the platform. It’s irritating when an episode of this or that show finishes and a streaming service decides to start the next one without any input from you. No one likes it when you hover over a show or movie for a second too long, and it starts playing a preview without your say-so. Paramount+ does this stuff, but so do a lot of other services.
But somehow it’s worse on Paramount+. For instance, while I was playing around on the homepage before writing this article, I tried loading up an episode of South Park, which is getting a lot of renewed attention this year after it decided to go all-in on mocking Donald Trump. But when I clicked on the South Park icon, the app started playing a preview of a true crime docu-series I’d never heard of called Never Seen Again, which was sitting a few spaces to the right. I assumed I’d clicked on Never Seen Again by mistake, so I backed out, which is a big deal because every time you click something on Paramount+ it takes at least 30 minutes to do what you told it to do. I clicked on South Park again, and the same thing happened.
So I hadn’t selected wrong; Paramount+ just decided to play a preview for Never Seen Again anyway. I pushed through until I got to the South Park episode select screen, which is what I was supposed to see in the first place.
Paramount is a legacy media company. It’s got the backing of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who has several hundred billion dollars to his name. What excuse is there for the UI to be this broken and bad? Streaming services have been around for a while, and most of the others have their stuff together. I don’t know why Paramount+ is dragging its feet, but I hate it.
Paramount wants to subject more people to this terrible UI
If they roll HBO Max into Paramount+, millions will suffer
I’m not complaining about Paramount+ completely at random. Paramount-Skydance is currently trying to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which operates the streaming service HBO Max. According to Bloomberg, should that deal go through, CEO David Ellison (son of Larry) plans to merge HBO Max into Paramount+, rather than the other way around.
The details aren’t finalized yet; maybe HBO Max would live on as a separate tab within Paramount+, in which case we could still use the entirely serviceable HBO Max UI. But if Ellison is planning on just porting over HBO Max content into Paramount+’s ecosystem, that would mean all those great HBO Max shows would be buried under Paramount+’s terrible UI, and that would suck.
It’s possible this deal won’t even happen, although I can see an upside to it; streaming services have proliferated over the years, and subscribing to all of them has gotten prohibitively expensive. A merged Paramount+/HBO Max service might offer more bang for the customer’s buck, which would be a good thing.
But my god, if one has to absorb the other, let HBO Max absorb Paramount+. At least that way I won’t feel dread pooling in my stomach whenever I want to watch something.
