I feel your pain & disgruntlement @Techuser_73 @nst ! But you’ve got off lightly by only having to endure for 8 months! It’s over 2 years since I first got involved with trialling a new NOW TV app for tv 😳
I would disagree with you "ready on one go" analogy.
Boost is marketed and advertised as 3 things. Multi Stream, HD, 5.1.
A Boost supported device should support all 3.
Whats the point of showing movies in HD with only 2 channel stereo sound.
IF they decided that Boost is a tiered offering, then the pricing should be tiered too. We should be expected to pay full price when one of the three components is missing.. (and an important one at that)
I wonder if the lack of 5.1 support at the moment is a capacity issue, and has been done on purpose to throttle the bandwidth until it can be rectified? I believe there was a similar issue on the YouView platform initially (where they had to stop 50fps transmission on live sports). I'm not sure if separate servers supply different platforms or not.
The only reason this crossed my mind is that I have noticed the picture quality dropping for a few seconds a couple of times during movie playback. I never noticed this during the beta trials, and it's not a device or broadband issue as I've streamed 4K HDR movies (with DD+) via the Apple TV app without issue before and after the Now TV stream. Just a thought..
Possibly... and I guess we won't know the difference between space required for 2.0 vs 5.1.
However, that suggests that they totally underestimated the demand for an AppleTV app and how many users would download it.
But if this were true, you'd have seem them release 5.1 from day one then rapidly withdraw it once they realised they had a problem.
i doubt from day 1 there are enough AppleTV customers out there that would cause such concern.
I always come back to wondering why they are embarrassing themselves releasing a boost add-on which only supports 2.0 stereo sound on its flagship movies service. Who wants 2.0 nowadays?
More embarrassing is whether they like it or not they share the streaming space in the UK with other companies such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ - and they all seem to manage not only HD and 5.1, but 4K and Atmos too.
A Boost stream uses just under 8Mb - irrespective of whether 2.0 or 5.1. So it's nothing to do with capacity / bandwidth.
I am quite happy with the new app, and not bothered whether the sound is 2 or 5.1.