Sony LIV 17+

4K streams, high frame rate. Horrible advertisement load and quality though.

First up, the app is amazing for viewing content. I got the subscription mainly for the Ashes and wasn’t disappointed one bit with the quality of the stream. Both on an iPad and a Mac with the promotion display, no pixelations at all.

I had streams open for an entire day of test go the breaks as well and am yet to experience a drop off or interruption. (This is mainly on good indoor Wi Fi and not on a mobile network so , there’s that)

Now for the parts that make the app almost unusable: The ads. The present tournament seems to have only a handful of sponsors that aren’t mainstream and the ads tend to be highly repetitive and timed awkwardly at times to come on between overs when the Fox sports broadcast goes through heat maps and analysis content. This is fine for a while , but over a full days test cricket, it makes it a terrible viewing experience.

Given this is the first time I’m using the app, I think it’s fair to cut them some slack as they figure out the user experience, but the ad load definitely makes me reconsider my purchase.

Four stars for now purely on the quality of the video content feed. Please work on the ads part if you don’t want to burn your early users out.

Hangs while watching but shoots advertisement flawlessly

If you don’t want to read the whole stuff, in short THE WORST APP I’ve ever used over last decade.
And yes Sonyliv doesn’t care what we think because they feel they are GOD!
While trying to watch any show, it keeps on hanging & crashing. But Sony LIV does perfect it showing advertisements flawlessly. Every time a stream hangs you have to restart and they shoot a series of advertisements. While watching one show of 40 min, there are scheduled 5 set of advertisements but it hangs/crashes for 7-8 times and those advertisement sets (3 advertisements) appear each time. So one show you have to watch advertisements sets 12-13 times or say 36-39 advertisements. I feel Sony is being cheap here and purposely manipulating this situation to shoot more advertisements so they can bill their advertisers more. They have some good shows like Master Chef, Indian Idol etc, but they have made sure you can’t watch any thing and your experience becomes absolutely pedestal grade. Any other, any other app is better as atleast they are not manipulators. Wish there was by any provision to give SONY LIV negative 5 stars, i would have definitely given them (- 5). Deleting the app so I don’t support the sinister agenda of Sony LIV.

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Shoddy App, Shoddy Customer Service

This rating isn’t merely for the below par quality of the app, although that isn’t excusable either. I’m compelled to write this since the customer service (assuming it actually exists) is terrible. The login system for the app was changed based on mobile numbers, but the concerned team simply didn’t consider linking the new logins with previous methods (Apple ID in this case) and simply started treating mine as a new account. Tl;dr - I had one month of premium subscription left but thanks to this mess I can’t watch any premium content for the remaining 30 days since my purchase can’t be restored. On raising this with customer service, I was asked to show a purchase receipt twice, which I did and then radio silence from the other end. Any thoughts I had on renewing the subscription are surely gone for now. Unless and until this app gets a major overhaul tech wise, I’m not coming back. At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s not enough to have good content on an OTT app. The tech needs equal if not more attention, which is sadly missing here as of now.