Issues With Paramount+ Streaming

I subscribed to Paramount+ earlier this year primarily to watch UFC programming. While watching UFC events has become more affordable, my experience with Paramount+ has recently gone in the opposite direction. The service has developed several frustrating problems that make simply watching an event unnecessarily difficult.

The first issue is that the Paramount+ iPhone (iOS) and Apple TV (tvOS) apps are buggy. I frequently try to access a show only to get errors. When quitting and re-launching apps are unsuccessful, I find that I have to try a different method to navigate to the UFC event to access the content. I’ve never experienced this with any other streaming service.

The second issue is that watching content from the Paramount+ website on a Safari browser is unreliable. When I try to go forward or backward by 10 seconds, the website has difficulty establishing a connection and often simply freezes so my only recourse is to refresh the page. This never happens on YouTube.

The third issue is that in the past few weeks, the quality of live streaming UFC events has been extremely poor and looks blocky. Although I don’t have a way to measure it, the resolution is clearly worse than 720p. This has been discussed on Reddit, and the issue is not related to my internet connection speed which is more than sufficient to stream 4K content. From the thread, I discovered that I can install the Paramount Quality+ plugins for either Firefox or Chrome to force Paramount+ to deliver the stream to me in 1080p resolution. I shouldn’t have to install a plugin to fix the streaming service.

Paramount is a huge company, so it is surprising to me that its streaming service has so many problems. I've experienced occasional hiccups with other streaming services, but those have generally been temporary and haven't affected my overall viewing experience. With Paramount+, however, I can't seem to watch an entire UFC event without repeatedly fiddling with the controls, restarting the broadcast, switching browsers, or trying some other workaround. Paramount, please fix these problems. Customers should be able to spend their time watching the content they’ve paid for instead of troubleshooting the service that’s supposed to deliver it.