By Joe Rosensteel
November 23, 2022 9:35 AM PT
tvOS 16 is better at search–Siriously
One of the banner features of Apple TV and tvOS, is the ability to use Siri to get to what you want without having to remember which app it’s in, or where it is. Unfortunately, it hasn’t always lived up to that sales pitch. But as of the latest version of tvOS, it’s gotten a lot better.
Apple has slowly tweaked accuracy over the years (requests for “The Thing” now sensibly display The Thing you expect, and not Fantastic Four movies.) It was also a pain that if you clicked/tapped on a result there was no way to get back to those search results if that item didn’t turn out to be what you wanted. Now you can!
The results pages were have also been cleaned up a little, to make those first few options as relevant as possible. It’s less optimal if you stay on the page too long, because tvOS will start playing a trailer in the top two-thirds of the screen. If you swipe or tap down to get away from the trailer it’ll stop. (Who really believes that people love autoplaying videos with sound?)
Streamlining options to Play, Play Again, and Add to Up Next are clear improvements over Buy In Store, or Play In—where you had to figure out the app that actually had the content in it. Instead, Play takes its best guess about where you want to play the content—for example, you probably want to watch that HBO show with the HBO Max app, and Star Trek with your Paramount+ app.
I’ve criticized the inaccuracy of of the How to Watch and Play In features before, and they’ll still show you ways to watch things that are not ways you can watch something. When I search for Westworld, the top portion of the results will offer to Play—and since I have HBO Max, that is perfect. But down on the page there’s an option to watch it with Hulu. What? Yes, technically you can subscribe to HBO through Hulu Plus Live TV and watch things there, but that’s a real edge case. Ideally, tvOS would know that I don’t have that service and not show it, but pushing the option way down in the list is a nice fallback.
tvOS also remembers where you left off in watching something, so long as the app shares its viewing history with the TV app. So when you ask for the show with Siri, it displays the episode where you last left off, and not the whole series starting from episode one. This is also true if it’s a show that you removed from your Up Next list in the Apple TV app. For instance, I rewatched an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but didn’t need it to always be in “Up Next” because I only wanted to revisit that one episode. The Siri results for Star Trek: The Next Generation show the episode that would have been Up Next. That’s, handy because you can still pick a different episode to play from right there in the search results.
Unfortunately, Apple seems to have decided that the ideal form to display a list of episodes of a TV series is a horizontal row. At least there’s a Season row to aid in navigation, but the idea that an entire TV series can only be viewed as one long ribbon of thumbnails is just baffling. Only three thumbnails are visible at a time, and the interface seems to load about six thumbnails at most, so if you swipe too fast you’ll have to wait for the system to catch up with you. On my otherwise fast fiber internet connection, it seems to take an eternity.
You still can’t tell Siri to play a specific episode by episode name, or by season and episode number. Attempts to ask for those things will just lump the words in with searching for the show title. Fixing that would bypass the bad episode interface in the search results. If I want to watch “Star Trek: Voyager Threshold” then don’t get in the way of that sweet, sweet lizard action.
While I have quibbles about many of Apple’s interface choices, at least they’re consistent. And I otherwise appreciate all the changes to Siri in tvOS. It’s much less fiddly to watch something by asking Siri for it now than it used to be. That’s a great thing.
Many people I’ve talked to have been burned by bad experiences trying to get to what they want with Siri, and have given up using it on their Apple TV. With tvOS 16, it’s worth giving Siri another shot. Even if you have to grope for that button on the side of the remote to make it happen.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
