[London Lite]

The standalone version seems to exist only to fulfil contractual agreements with existing plans & Amazon Channels.

Give it twelve month and the name will be history (over here anyway).

I’m not so sure, even if the standalone app goes. Keeping BritBox content under that banner seems to make sense and is a good way to reflect the fact it’s more than just classic content from ITV. To be able to say ITV X includes BritBox just adds value to the offering, in similar way Disney+ has its sub brands. That said doesn’t the BBC agreement run out at some point in the future?

BBC Studios renewed their contract with ITVX/Britbox to continue providing programming when ITVX was announced.

[Newsroom]

tvOS has finally received the update to ITVX...but it's so much worse than it was.

There is no 'Categories' section at all, so you are forced to search for whatever it is you want. No access to the ITVX News. It's either a huge oversight or an utter waste of time.

[sjhoward]

Here’s a fun bit of branding clash on 37 Days on the iPhone app: itvx, itv hub, Britbox and BBC all in one!

[Jon]

tvOS has finally received the update to ITVX...but it's so much worse than it was.

There is no 'Categories' section at all, so you are forced to search for whatever it is you want. No access to the ITVX News. It's either a huge oversight or an utter waste of time.

It’s rubbish isn’t it? It has X symbol like on IOS but instead of taking you categories it just takes you to plug for the paid version. 

The live channels page just seems like a reskin of what they had on ITV Hub with none of fast channels and without the proper EPG. Considering the likes of Pluto TV have the built in EPG on the platform it doesn’t seem impossible. It makes me wonder if all the smart TV versions will have any live channels, considering they didn’t have them before.

[IanJRedman]

ITVX hasn't rolled out to LG TVs yet - but ITVX have posted on Twitter that, even when it does, the live channels won't be available on LG. Does this extend to the FAST channels, I wonder?

[Jon]

ITVX hasn't rolled out to LG TVs yet - but ITVX have posted on Twitter that, even when it does, the live channels won't be available on LG. Does this extend to the FAST channels, I wonder?

In that case almost certainly I’d say. Basically it sounds like ITV X is already on LG in all but name  in that case as it’s already had an update to have the ITV X layout. 

I wonder what reason is? Again other apps have live channels on the platform, such as Pluto TV and iPlayer so it’s technically possible. But we’ve seen the Samsung app will have live channels, so perhaps that’s android based or something and easier to do? 

Either way, it all seems pretty half arsed.

*Edit: seems the LG’s webOS and Samsung operating systems are based Linux based.

[MFTJA]

tvOS has finally received the update to ITVX...but it's so much worse than it was.

There is no 'Categories' section at all, so you are forced to search for whatever it is you want. No access to the ITVX News. It's either a huge oversight or an utter waste of time.

It's always a bit of a mixed bag in terms of how good apps are on tvOS. ITV Hub is pretty awful as well to the point where I've largely stopped watching ITV shows on-demand

[Johnr]

My Apple TV has been gathering dust since I found out BBC iPlayer doesn’t even have subtitles available! (Which is odd considering I can watch with subtitles perfectly fine on my iPhone, surely the architecture isn’t *that* different!)

Sadly I don’t think the Apple TV is popular enough to encourage developers to get their finger out a bit more

[Critique]

Unlike other platforms (as far as I’m aware), with Apple TV I guess the ideal scenario is that you don’t use the individual apps at all and find content via the built-in search tool/the Apple TV app.

I got an Apple TV a few months back and when it all works properly it’s probably the most cohesive VoD experience there is, similar to linear TV (Freeview, Sky etc) in that you can access pretty much everything through a single interface rather than it being fragmented across different apps and interfaces.

For those that aren’t familiar, searching for an episode of a show within the Apple TV app and selecting it will take you straight to watching that content, without having to find it again on the individual VoD service’s app. The content you watch, no matter what service you what it on (apart from, frustratingly, Netflix), then gets fed back into the Apple TV app to generate recommendations and an ‘Up next’ queue.

Ultimately, this doesn’t leave broadcasters with much incentive to make good apps for Apple TV, although iPlayer not having subtitles is obviously ludicrous!

[radiorebel]

Does anyone have any idea why the Apple TV app doesn’t have the fast channels? Very disappointing after the long wait.