Great app, needs some polish. – SailGP Review

The actual viewing experience is nice, with multicam views and telemetry. I found myself viewing the FB stream on my TV through a connected MacBook, while using this app on an iPad in umpire view and and iPhone showing telemetry - usually split view with AUS & JPN, but changed telemetry to whichever boat was on the host broadcast a few times. Some minor quibbles follow. The Rolex countdown timer has been wrong until version 1.0.4, and there’s not enough localized information about when the live-streams will begin. The website’s watch page had confusing/conflicting information for most of the week. For Sydney Day 1, finally in version 1.0.4 of the app, there was an accurate countdown timer, but no start time in my time zone (or at all). Ever since the coverage of Day 1 ended and the replay became available, there is no countdown to Day 2 or start time, just the current time in Sydney and in my time zone in the Rolex banner on the bottom. This has made it difficult to plan our local club’s viewing party (Severn Sailing Association in Annapolis, MD, USA). On my iPhone XS Max, the video could not be zoomed to full the whole screen, and the home bar remained visible during the entire video (live and replay). As there’s no Apple TV app - why!? - one would think the Airplay experience would have been good. Sadly not. Since the app doesn’t support Airplaying the video, I had to resort to Airplay screen mirroring. Airplay screen mirroring to an LG OLED paired with an Apple TV 4K required me to manually zoom horizontally and vertically. The home bar was still visible at the bottom unless I zoomed in to remove that part of the video from the screen. App support for Airplay should fix this. I understand that smooth live-streaming to a large audience and drone live-streaming caps dictated a 720p live-stream. It would be nice for replays to be shown at up to 4K. It would be nice for app users to be able to temporarily zoom and pan the umpire view ourselves; after a few seconds of no pan/zoom activity, it could go back to whatever pan/zoom the umpires have selected. Thanks for a great experience so far!
Review by Zenodux on SailGP.