Needs a bit more work to be compelling – Motorsport.tv: Racing Videos Review

This is a good service hindered by a few limitations, mostly in terms of UI. (Writing this in early June 2019, and 2.0 just got released, so keep in mind some or all of these might have been fixed!) 1) Not supporting picture-in-picture or even split screen! It’s amazing I can finally watch full SuperGT races! But that would be three hours where my iPad is a dedicated monitor to one thing. Not a good oversight when every streaming service has this. 2) basic sorting— on a series’ page, the strip listing full races helpfully includes future live broadcasts, but they seem to be totally randomized instead of chronological order? It’s super confusing. Similarly the list of Programs is poorly organized. There’s several different ones for the WEC: “Inside WEC” has individual race summaries from 2017, “FIA WEC Live Racing” has one episode recap of the entire 2016 season, and another called “Special events” which is weirdly just an ACO press conference about the 2018 Le Mans, and so on. Dakar & Rally Raid events has a similar problem; F1 news has at least five or six different channels. With as much content as motorsport.tv has- and to be clear, there’s a TON of great content here!— collating these better would be tremendously useful to get a picture of what’s on offer. (A search function would also be useful, given how much there is to navigate!) 3) When using the free version, there’s a blue corner to denote paid-membership content, which is fine, that’s a good signal. However, there’s a bunch of videos Without that corner, appearing free, that preview the first two minutes before prompting the membership upgrade screen. This is reeeaally bad UI. A second marker noting “preview available” would be helpful but as is, this will make users paranoid about what is or isn’t available. 4) Given the large diversity of content, you really gotta to include the run time under the thumbnail. In non-races alone, you have 5-10 minute tech analyses, to half-hour-to-an-hour race previews/summaries, to full two-hour documentaries. Less important things I assume are already on the list but worth mentioning: Chromecast support, being able to favorite or otherwise bookmark content to watch later. Basically, I hope the app gets nearly as good as the service, because I’m enthusiastically looking forward to being a paying subscriber!
Review by Will Pierce on Motorsport.tv: Racing Videos.