C-SPAN Now 4+

I love the new app. I have an iPhone 6S Plus. That’s a pretty old device, though it runs the latest version of iOS. The app runs just fine on this device.

However, I also have an iPod Touch, 7th gen. This is a much newer device, released in 2019. I’ve had mine since 2020. It also runs the latest version of iOS.

Oddly enough, video clips from the “Watch” page don’t play on the iPod Touch. Live stuff will play.

But if I tap on a video from “Featured Clips” or “Washington Journal” or “Q&A”, the page loads up, with a blank space where the video player is supposed to be.

If I tap on that blank space, I can see the video player, with the start and end time and the play button. I can tap the play button, but the video never starts playing.

I hope you can test it on an iPod Touch and figure out the problem. The iPod touch is my goto device for consuming media around the house.

We're so happy you are loving the new app! Thanks for reporting this issue. We have asked our developers to look into it. Please be on the lookout for updates to the app.

Rather than a central place for all your podcasts and stuff, it would be way better to focus on your video content. I really want to see other clips that include the same speaker, or the same topic. Search and tagging could get it there.. but I sense this was designed with the intent to get all the features in the same app, which isn’t very useful. I’ll use a podcast app for the podcasts..

Update: Thanks for the response! As a mobile dev, I would say though that you’ve got a bit of a “straddling canoes” problem then.. The app is trying to be a home for a smattering of features rather than having a focused purpose. Btw, social media apps can’t do what you could do with an focused on cataloguing cspan content, social media is only really good for recent content, which seems to be also what this app is doing. Anyways, I would still love an app that was trying to have a full archive like your website does, and I would love it even more if there was an audio only option, so I can listen to speeches while I drive. Thanks!

Thanks for your feedback, Seth. We hear what you're saying, but also hear from others that they enjoy the access to our audio content on the app. In terms of clips - only select clips make it to the app, if you are interested in seeing more clips from events, the best place would be to follow us social media - X, Instagram and Tik Tok. We purposefully don't have a search function as the app is meant only for the most recent events and won't have the full archive that our website does.

Way to go, C-SPAN! Finally an app to watch political events without TV talking heads or commercial interruptions. I love how C-SPAN just lets you see the whole thing and this puts it all on my phone to watch.

Quick take: it's easy to find live coverage of events, and the Featured Clips are timely and a great way to catch-up on what's newsy each day. Best of all you get free, live access to the big political events. As with other TV nets' apps you have to sign-in to watch the actual 3 C-SPAN TV channels (I guess that's fair because that's how C-SPAN is funded). All in all I'm giving this top rating for its simplicity and for giving me what I most want to watch from C-SPAN.

We're thrilled you appreciate C-SPAN's think-for-yourself approach to showing Washington's biggest news making events. Thank you for your kind words – we're glad you're liking the app!