Ski & Snowboard Live 4+

It’s nice that there is finally an app. The subscription is pricey and sometimes the replays are not available. Being in North America it’s nice to be able to watch European events at a reasonable hour. Lately the app has been saying I “need a subscription” (which I have) to watch a replay. So I have to log out and log back in for some reason and that fixes it. Lots of room for improvement considering the price!

We use the iOS app on Apple TV, latest hardware and software, 100mbs+ internet. This is our 3rd year with this app. While the app itself is far less glitchy than it first was, its functionality is still terrible. You want to watch an Alpine race from 12 hours ago? The app will show the event as “upcoming” on the Home menu and is not listed at all under the Alpine menu. After clicking a bunch of different menus and then going back to the Home menu the event will finally show up as available for replay. Still won’t show up under Alpine. The back end service can’t keep track subscriber access rights either. We are forever getting a barrage of unhelpful error messages barring access to events and are forever logging out and logging back in to try to get around them. Often we’ll watch one event just fine but when going straight to the next event an error message will say “Video Requires a Subscription” - which the service seemed to have been aware of one replay prior… Multiple rounds of frustration every night. The Nordic commentators are good but the Alpine events mostly have ones so bad we go with the volume off. What an embarrassment to the U.S. Ski Teams and their sponsors.

The app is mediocre. It requires you to log out and back in to recognize your account most times you use it. This is annoying, but tolerable.

The price went up 30% this year I guess "just because". This was also annoying, but not entirely unexpected since they have a monopoly on 90% of FIS Alpine event broadcasts to US residents and it's not like we have a choice but to pay it if we want to follow the full season.

What really makes me angry is that the Alpine Subscription, which includes "All Alpine events", does NOT include the 2025 World Championship. This is $30 more! But you don't learn about that until you sit down with your family to watch the replay of the first race of the championships, get an app error saying you're not authorized to view it, log out and log back in following the usual routine described above, get the same error, log out and in again thinking it's just broken, get the same error, go to the website to view it and are told "This video is for paying viewers. Here are some options we offer" and get an option to pay $4 PER REPLAY or $30 for all of them, then email support explaining there's an issue b/c you have access to "All Alpine events", and are then explained that oh, no, that's not really ALL Alpine events, it's just events in the regular World Cup season, if you want ALL, you need to pay $30 more. What a way to ruin a good thing.

The mediocre app is worth 3 stars and the deceptive pricing brings it down to 1.