I downloaded this for taskmaster which is extraordinarily funny and worth watching the odd advert for. You cannot, of course, insist your tv plays all episodes any time of day or night adverts or not. It just will not listen. Whatever you say it will punctuate any episodes with top gear or American pickers or storage hunters or antiques road trip or rick steins food orgy or two men in a shack or pickled Rodney dangerfield or cor blimey what a wizard or monkey tennis or cheese wars or Jesus in a flatcap or the life and times of billy bremner or defacing the greats or florist gauntlet or dremmamine slalom or Leopoldo blooms brand new shoes or once I wrote a best selling matchbook or drifting bin bags or red gurnards for shoes or spawning frogs or ten minute shoelaces or beetle sandwiches or beatle sandwiches or book spine chronicles or the reality wars or awful orbs or once I hosted a jam sandwich (police car) raffle or optimum level or wheelbarrow narratives or mike silvers lost ball bag or bargain hunt.

Everytime I use this app it’s slow to load and I’m forced to endure advert breaks of nearly 200 seconds (nearly 4 mins) which can’t be skipped. If I move the slider along to watch the last 2 minutes of a program I have to watch these very long ad breaks and often the picture just freezes when the program does come on. Seen as the adverts work fine goes to prove its not my internet connection that’s faulty! Goes to show UKTV play thinks it’s adverts are more important than its TV shows. A few weeks ago we had to endure that extremely irritating Pepa Pig handwashing advert every program enough to make any person scream! If I could give this App less than 1 star I would!

Like others, I downloaded this app for Taskmaster, which I have been absolutely loving. Whilst no one is disputing the content UKTV offers, the app badly lets them down. Not intuitive, doesn’t always remember where you left off, forces you to watch 200+secs of ads while you scroll forwards and backwards to resume your place, ads cut in in the middle of the show. I usually watch UKTV Play on my phone, if I choose to cast to my tv, the app will not register what you watched while casting, it seems to only remember what you watched directly on the app. And while we’re on the subject...where has the cast feature disappeared to? It suddenly disappeared without a trace!I also noticed if I left the app during a break to respond to a message. I found, the 210secs of ads would then repeat, meaning I would watch 420secs of ads. Leave the app during the break a second time (which I did many many times before I could pinpoint what the issue was), and I could end up watching 640secs of ads, and so on...!The app also times out too quickly. I’m used to flitting between apps while I watch something to respond to messages, catch up on news, etc. You’re lucky if you get 1 minutes grace to return to the app before it times out and you have to select your show again, meaning you will now need to watch a series of ads again before you can resume. Address the issues with the ads, bring back the cast button,add a +10/-10 button to make scrolling through an episode easier.A lot of apps now offer continuous playback when you leave the app...but that might be running before we can crawl, here.

The content UKTV has is absolutely outstanding, a great varied mix of high quality shows. However…The app really lets them down. It is poorly coded resulting in a terrible experience far below the quality of the content. Main problem is that it has a very low cache and no ability to download, so if you’re travelling say on a commute if your signal drops for a moment the show will stop, majority of the time you will also lose your place and will reset an episode to the beginning. The platform is also dependent on ads which is fair enough but issue is when combined with the above issue you have a situation where when you lose signal for a moment say going through a tunnel you’ll lose connection then when it’s resumed you’ll be forced to sit through 2 minutes of adverts, only to fine at the end of which it’s taken you back to the start of the episode. It also doesn’t sync well across devices, if I get half way through an episode of something on my phone and want to watch the rest on the tv app at home you need to remember the exact episode number and the time where you finished. I’d be happy to pay for a tier where there was downloading was possible.