TVNZ+ Upgrade - What's Changing?

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Smpl Mnmlst
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#3483792 24-Apr-2026 17:47

johno1234:

I misunderstood what you were saying. I thought you meant 'closed and restarted the app'. So I tried rebooting the ATV - then restarted the app.

Made no difference whatsoever. The issues described in my post above are still there. Seems to work OK in on-demand shows - but totally borked with live TV.

So do you reboot your ATV every time you want to use TVNZ+?

Not watching live channels. We watch the 6pm news on demand typically at around 7pm. After the update it usually refuses to start playing until I restart the AppleTV.

TBH that’s why I asked about ‘live’. In that case, I don’t think you can say it’s flawless. It seems the live TV is borked on ATV.

So it still sounds like you have to reboot the ATV each time you want to watch TVNZ+? If that’s the case, that’s also not flawless.

Sometimes I just sit and think. Other times I just sit.

RunningMan

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#3483799 24-Apr-2026 19:13

eracode:

Would be grateful to hear from a few people using the new app on ATV. If you select 'Channels' and watch live TV, does the back button on the ATV remote take you back to app Home so that you can select on-demand shows and watch them without problems?

Our back button does not work and the only thing that can be done is exit the app by long-pressing it.

Yep it's covered earlier in the thread, but as soon as you watch one live channel, the app will not respond to anything again. If you return to the ATV home screen and double click the TV button you can swipe up to force quit the app without rebooting the ATV.

RunningMan

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#3483801 24-Apr-2026 19:14

eracode:

Finally this morning this story in NZH. Pretty accurate and appropriately scathing.

The link is paywalled.

johno1234

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#3483822 24-Apr-2026 20:56

So it still sounds like you have to reboot the ATV each time you want to watch TVNZ+? If that’s the case, that’s also not flawless.

Tip: when reading something written by a human, especially when there’s an emoji on it, don’t interpret it too literally.

RunningMan

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#3483824 24-Apr-2026 21:01

johno1234:

So it still sounds like you have to reboot the ATV each time you want to watch TVNZ+? If that’s the case, that’s also not flawless.

Tip: when reading something written by a human, especially when there’s an emoji on it, don’t interpret it too literally.

Tip: When quoting, don't delete the username of who the quote is attributed to.

bfginger

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#3483839 24-Apr-2026 23:29

dafman:

It's a 2018 TH-65FZ95OU - it looks like it it is running My Home Screen 3.0. Two days ago, Grand designs just returned a light blue screen, yesterday it took around a minute to load, then a long time to come up to full resolution (but was good res when it finally arrived). Navigating around the app is definitely more laggy than historic. It could be the TV age is struggling with the update maybe.

With the older Panasonic smart TVs that always turn on into broadcast TV and have a physical on/off switch on the back or side, change to an empty station like 160 then turn the TV off with the switch and back on again then launch TVNZ+ or ThreeNow. The NZ streaming apps are bloated so flushing as much free ram as possible can help with performance and stability. I didn't notice any deterioration other than the Continue Watching list was either rearranged or lost an item.

With GoogleTV I set app updates to manual-only because I thought it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. The old app still works fine.

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johno1234

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#3483847 25-Apr-2026 07:11

RunningMan:

Tip: When quoting, don't delete the username of who the quote is attributed to.

I’m restricted on quote depth so have to delete large blocks. On a phone that’s difficult to do accurately so it often deletes too far.

I hope you can cope and find a way to deal with this. Perhaps scroll up?

gzt

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#3483850 25-Apr-2026 07:32

Looks like it is no longer logged in and requires user/pass to get going. Is login status loss normal for TVNZ app releases? Last time that happened we didn't watch it for six months ; ). TVNZ app on Google Streamer.

RunningMan

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#3483857 25-Apr-2026 07:59

johno1234:

I hope you can cope and find a way to deal with this. Perhaps scroll up?

No, that's not practical to do when the quote could be from several pages back. Perhaps just double check when quoting that you haven't deleted the username.

JarrodM

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#3483858 25-Apr-2026 08:31

It does not appear to mark the shows as watched anymore, rendering the continue watching feature useless. Shortland Street used to go live on demand at 7pm now it doesn’t go until 7:30.

I’m not sure why anyone would pay for a World Cup pass based on the app’s performance right now

RunningMan

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#3483859 25-Apr-2026 08:46

The home screen doesn't show recently watched shows any more, so you can;t start on the home screen and keep watching a series.

You just have the massive banner of about 5 shows spammed at you bouncing sideways across the screen.

There seems to be serious failures at multiple levels here:
1) The bugs, crashes, usability and very low bitrate - that's just bad QC or a marketing pushing a product out before it's ready, and now it backfires on them
2) The design UX/UI or lack thereof - it's clumsy, clunky and just not intuitive to use any more. This is more fundemental planning and development that has been overlooked.

As an update, watched a few episode of a program yesterday evening, and the bitrate was just under 1 Mb/s. Looking at the connection, it peaks at the fibre headline speed for several seconds every 5 minutes (yep, it's buffering that amount) with nothing in between, so I don't see this as a local network capacity issue.

At 1 Mb/s bitrate through the stream quality is pretty dire on a TV. This is degradation from the about 1.3 Mb/s earlier in the week.

EDIT: The Continue Watching does reapear on the home screen with a force quit, but as as @JarrodM says, it isn't updated. At a guess it's stuck on historic data that was grabbed perhaps 6-8 weeks ago and doesn't add new stuff you watch.

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RunningMan

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#3483870 25-Apr-2026 10:15

eracode:

Finally this morning this story in NZH. Pretty accurate and appropriately scathing.

Having now read that article, a TVNZ+ spokeswoman claims there are app updates being released daily. Why is it that the Apple TV app remains on version 7.0.1 released on 18 April?

eracode

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#3483871 25-Apr-2026 10:41

RunningMan:

eracode:

Finally this morning this story in NZH. Pretty accurate and appropriately scathing.

Having now read that article, a TVNZ+ spokeswoman claims there are app updates being released daily. Why is it that the Apple TV app remains on version 7.0.1 released on 18 April?

Was just thinking that myself. Maybe they’re updating other versions of the app daily - but the ATV app? Nothing has changed.

Sometimes I just sit and think. Other times I just sit.

schnopp

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#3483898 25-Apr-2026 14:44

Still broken. Tacky PR from firm who are entering brave new era but can't be bothered to say sorry. Absolutely no change in the way the software functions. TVNZ can't be bothered providing after hours service when they have botched up, just Taki

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johno1234

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#3483900 25-Apr-2026 14:53

Is this a cross platform issue? Seems better on iPhone than AppleTV.

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