Awful NowTV Player - Sack your developers

[Anonymous User]

I've never liked Sky these recent years, I think the NowTV boxes are objectively awful but found that NowTV was the only way to watch 'Westworld' by a friend's recommendation. I fully charged my laptop, which usually lasts about 8 hours watching Netflix, only to find a low battery warning halfway through my second episode of westworld. 

The culprit? The absolutely atrocious NowTV player.

 

The video is paused, it is not playing. Yet the NowTV player fully exhausts an entire CPU core and after debugging your application I found that your DRM is responsible for also thrashing the WindowServer in a vain attempt to somehow mask the window from the main composite.

You have the audacity to charge more than Netflix for a small subset of awful shows but even worse mandate this god awful software for me to even consume the content. The good news is that in an attempt to work out what the hell your terrible piece of software is doing on my machine, I essentially found that you are using Cisco's Video Guard anti-piracy tools and because of how poorly written the NowTV player is.

Your content is not protected, the video stream is plainly available because I am able to see it with my own eyes and also hear it, yet you insist on providing a crappy experience in a vain attempt to stop people from snagging your content, I would strongly advise fixing your software and at least settling with some other type of DRM than this joke of Cisco software. The methods it uses to achieve it's copy protection are akin to malicious software and it would take less than a few days to write a nice tool to completely blow away the copy protection so that my laptop lasts longer than 2 hours using your crappy video player.

[Anonymous User]

To make matters worse I have also discovered that the NowTV player and it's DRM scan the local system aggressively in an attempt to detect pirates, the concerning thing is that this data seems to be collected without the users consent.

[ukbobboy]

@Anonymous User

Hi B

You know, I get the feeling that Now TV does not employ "their" developers directly, it's more than likely that the developers are contracted in, by Sky, from an outside company and that Now TV has no choice but to share in Sky's negotiated contract.

Please note, I have no knowledge of Now TV's business plans or internal processes, my speculation is simply based on how IT services are now purchased.

Finally, as you probably know, most companies have now "got rid of" their own internal IT staff and now buy in services as and when needed, that's why you are now seeing so many IT failures in the banking industry, e.g RBS and TBS.

UK Bob