Suggest Your Ideas for NOW TV Here!!!

[Andy]

This dedicated thread is for users to suggest ways to improve the NOW TV service that aren’t already in the Ideas Board.

Any ideas for improving NOW TV are welcome, and if the NOW TV Team especially like any of the ideas and think they could work you may be lucky and have your idea moved into the Ideas Board for others to vote on it. 

Please reply to this post with any ideas you have, and if you like any of the ideas do reply and let us know, and give them thanks if you agree.

Thanks to @Anonymous User for requesting this thread.

[schnapps]

Hi @Anonymous User 

What NOW playback device are you using ?

On my Amazon 4K Fire Stick, when i switch on subtitles in the Fire Stick Accessibility settings and when i watch a supported subtitle content on the NOW App and after clicking the bubble speech icon when pressing the enter button on the Fire Stick remote and select English Subtitles.

Then subtitles will appear on screen on continuous TV episodes or Movies whilst the NOW App is left open.

One drawback is if i close the NOW App and then reopen the NOW App later on, i need to again start playing a subtitle supported NOW content, by pressing the enter button on the remote to bring up the bubble speech icon again to trigger subtitles.

Don't know how subtitles play out on other NOW playback devices.

[Anonymous User]

- yearly passes

- w, alibi and crime+investigation channels

- share button for instagram stories

[Anonymous User]

MAJOR OVERHAUL OF GUIDE/GENRES AND SEARCH FUNCTIONS

I choose films and entertainment to watch mainly by genre and while I love NOW TV, the genre options are suboptimal at best.

Suggestions:

1. Revamp FILM genres (some added, some merged)

~ "Action & Adventure"

~ "Comedy"

~ "Drama"

~ "Family"

~ "Fantasy & Sci-Fi" (including Superheroes)

~ "Mystery & Crime" (including thrillers and horror)

~ "Relationship" - or "Relational" or some other suitable title  (this would resuscitate the old Romance genre, which is one of the major genres in film-making and simply cannot be left out) but would include a broader range: all films where the plot revolves around intimate relationships, family dynamics, parent/granparent and child, mentor or substitute parent, sibling relationship, friendship, and closely knit groups of people/communities, whether comedy or drama, and where the psychological angle is the main driver (e.g. I wouldn't include films about gangster families etc.)

That's it, as far as genres are concerned. The rest, currently listed under genres are  not in fact genres. Some of them could be moved to the Options that run vertically on the TV screen (starting with Recently Added).

2. Revamp FILM options (vertically running)

Move LGBT here, and add the following PERMANENT options:

~ "Under 100 Minutes" (this is very important, most people can't stay up to watch long movies during the week, and having a permanent list of anything from 70 to a 100 minutes is immensely useful and necessary)

~ "Decade by Decade" - or just "Decade"  - and then as sub genres: 2010+, '10s, 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s, Golden Era

~ Maybe also add permanently an "Award Nominated" option, where films that have been nominated for or won an Oscar, Golden Globe or BAFTA for film, script, director, actor/actress (including supporting), or cinematographer would be listed

3. Introduce sub-genres

On the genre page, ALL films within each genre would be automatically listed, as is currently the case, but there would be buttons on the top of the page for sub-genres to narrow down the search if that's what the viewer wants.

I will only suggest a few, because I don't watch MOST popular genres - will leave it to others to work out the best categories in some

Mystery & Crime:

  ~ Mystery

  ~ Thriller

  ~ Crime

  ~ Horror

Relationship:

  ~ Romantic

  ~ Family & Friends

  ~ Group/Community

4. Reavamp ENTERTAINMENT genres, and again, introduce sub genres:

~ Action (sub genre suggestions welcome)

~ Comedy (again, this needs to be split up as it's a hotchpotch and there are currently 314 items in it!)

    ~ Comedy Series

    ~ Comedians & Shows (all standup, sketch shows etc. by comedians)

   to illustrate, Monthy Python would go under Comedians & Shows while Fawlty  Towers would go under Comedy Series; same with French & Saunders vs The Vicar of Dibley or Ab Fab

    ~ Drama (sub genre suggestions welcome)

    ~ Sci-Fi

    ~ Real Life, with the following sub-categories (which includes all documentaries)

          ~ True Crime

          ~ Reality

          ~ Music   this category to be further split into

                     ~ concerts, festivals & live musicals  and albums (i.e. anything that is music all the way through)

                     ~ Docu[mentaries]: bands, singers, styles (e.g. Rock 'n Roll, Soul) etc (i.e. anything that mixes music and narration)

                     ~ Classical Music Performances

                     ~ Docu[mentaries]: Classical Music

          ~ Docu[mentaries]: Film, TV, Theatre (including all programmes on famous actors and actresses, whether produced by Sky Arts or Sky Documentaries)

          ~ Docu[mentaries]: Art & Literature

          ~ Docu[mentaries]: History, Politics, Society

          ~ Docu[mentaries]: Science, Nature, Mind and Health

          ~ Docu[mentaries]: Sport

          ~ Docu[mentaries]: "Interesting Topics" or some other appealing name for everything that is not included in any of the other documentary categories

The current "Factual Favourites" and "Essential Viewing" are not genres and are very vague as to what they cover and need to be scrapped. Some "favourite" category could be moved to the Options that run vertically (starting with Trending)

5. Add SORT options

so the viewer can choose items to be displayed in one of the following ways:

~ Alphabetical (A-Z)

~ Date added to NOW TV

~ Date of release [of film] or first episode [Tv series] - ascending and descending options

6. Improve the SEARCH function

The Search function is very good on certain things but fail on others, like documentaries. I caught a programme half way through on TV on a famous actor on the Sky Arts channel, and when I put in the name in the NOW TV search to watch the whole programme, nothing came up. After a long search, I found out that it was part of the "Discovering" series, which has been running for 13 seasons now, with 13 episodes in each. There is no one-page listing anywhere of all the actors/actresses featured, and the Sky Arts page on NOW TV only lists the name of the LAST actor that is covered in each series. If one goes online, one can find each season on the NOW TV website, and then manually have to go through each episode of each season one by one to find an actor. It took me 10x13 plus 7 episodes to find Richard Gere... and then figure out that I'll find that season by checking out what actor the last episode in the season is on...

I then put in Cary Grant - and again, the Search function didn't come up with anything.

To give further examples, in addition to the Discovering series, there are other series as well where the programmes are not named after the actors they cover, like "BAFTA", "Undiscovered", "Too Young to Die", "In Confidence" etc.

I then ended up systematically going through around 690(!) items on Sky Arts, and found some more interesting titles, like Agatha Christie vs. Hercule Poirot, but didn't watch it right away - and then when I later put in Agatha in the Search, only Agatha Raisin came up, and nothing when I put in Agatha Christie...

So: All the documentaries (whether currently in Documentaries or Music & Arts) need to be re-indexed by the name of the artist/person/band/composer etc. covered, and made searchable through the Search function.

 7. The ENTERTAINMENT programme listing needs to be tidied up

- e.g. under Comedy, many titles, such as Only Fools and Horses come up numerous times (as I don't watch this, I'm not sure what these cover - maybe one for each season??) - they all need to be merged into one.

And again, under Documentries, things like the Discovering [actors and actresses] searies need to be merged and re-named (e.g. Discovering Hollywood Stars or Hollywood's Greats) and the seasons displayed within this, like in drama and comedy series.

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[Anonymous User]

Why are you censoring websites that advocate freedom of speech? Who are you to decide what websites I get to access??? Are we living in an authoritarian dictatorship or communist China? I thought this was the UK!? 

[schnapps]

Hi @Anonymous User 

Have you followed the information on the other thread that you also posted on ?

https://community.nowtv.com/t5/Off-Topic-Chat/Censorship/m-p/564727#M20179 

[Sarah21]

Sorry if anyone has put these, but just from my experience it's an issue:

1. I use subtitles. But every time I exit for the evening it resets it the next day so I have to go back into it and request subtitles again. If I've clicked it once can it not auto be on there? I also notice the subtitles don't always show correctly (letters jumble or squished)

2. I use NOW downstairs on my smart TV. When I go upstairs to watch on ps4 it doesn't always remember where I was last. So it's quite frustrating

3. Is there any way to skip intro? I'm binge watching a show right now and every single episode I have to watch the 2 min intro. I get I can fast forward but it would be nice to just have a box to appear saying "skip intro" so I can click

[Tom532]

I read that Now TV is experimenting with Apple Pay. So I'm wondering if it's also a possibility that Google Pay can also be added as a membership payment method?
https://developers.google.com/pay/api/web/overview

[F1Jon96]

@Andy Probably the biggest idea I can suggest is infrastructure related.  If Now were able to shift away from the old Sky Q / Sky Go on demand system and use the new Sky Stream/Comcast Xfinity infrastructure I hope we could get extra features for sport i.e watch from start, longer/unlimited pause and instant availability on demand (using cloud recording functionality). Im sure others would also say 4K but id settle for those other features first.

[F1Jon96]

@Andy  Another one from me.  Could the dev's get the 30 min live pause to work on apple tv?  When I tried it starts creeping forward after a few mins.

[Officer_K]

The ONLY thing NOW need to add are 4K HDR & Atmos streams. That's all. Then none of us ever have to use the apocalyptically bad Sky Stream pucks. 

I'd pay £10pm for a UHD Boost option. Come on NOW, you know you want to....