What’s the word on Pluto TV’s user interface?
What’s the word on Pluto TV’s user interface?
I’ve been critical of Pluto TV in the past. Is its user interface really that bad?
As a fan of many Paramount-owned properties, I find myself in the company’s streaming ecosystem often. That means I’m intimately aware of the ins and outs of both Paramount+ and Pluto TV, and I know exactly how much apps for both services need an upgrade. They’re glitchy, slow, and likely overburdened with code, and can make the watching experience ponderous.
But past those glitches, how easy is it to use the Pluto TV interface when you just want to browse around and watch some free TV? Does the service deserve more hate for its user experience, or does it do a good job of laying out its content in an intuitive way? Check out my review of Pluto TV, where I score the biggest aspects of its user experience below.
How do we score the Pluto TV interface?
How good is the Pluto TV home page?
One negative I have to start with here is that the Pluto TV connected TV app — at least on my Fire TV — doesn’t bring you to the home screen, but rather automatically begins playing a live channel instead. This is not a setting that can be adjusted anywhere in the Pluto menu and takes my annoyance with autoplay to new heights.
Once you actually make it to the home screen, things do improve. There’s a top row of titles that are seemingly just selected at random by Pluto, but under that is my Continue Watching row, and under that are the recent free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels I’ve accessed. Note, however, that if you leave Pluto TV’s home screen without pushing any buttonsfor too long, it will automatically switch you back to live channel playback.
The Pluto TV home screen puts continue watching rows near the top of the screen. Click to expand.
The home screen offers pretty basic categories like Top TV Series and Most Popular Movies, though I was surprised to see a timely collection of Robert Redford titles advertised on Pluto TV in the days following his passing. Viewers can also see movies that are available only through the end of the month and plenty of other content rows, but don’t expect the streamer to employ any kind of advanced algorithm to learn about your preferences.
All in all, the home screen itself on Pluto TV is pretty good. But the streamer makes it so hard to get there, and to stay there once you arrive, that it loses plenty of points in my opinion.
Home page score: 4 out of 10
How easy is content discovery on Pluto TV?
Content discovery is easy enough on Pluto, especially if you’re browsing through live FAST channels on the streamer. The Pluto TV channel guide lets you sort by more than 20 different filters, such as sports channels, news, anime, and more. That makes it quick to narrow down the type of channel you came to the streamer to watch, although once again, putting the remote down for any length of time past a few seconds will automatically resume a live channel stream.
You can browse by category in the On Demand menu on Pluto TV as well, and the streamer also has a search function to help you narrow down exactly what title you want to watch. There’s nothing inherently difficult about content discovery on Pluto TV, which lays out its categories in easy-to-navigate ways that give customers an effective way to filter and narrow down their options until they find what they’re looking for, either with live channels or on-demand content.
Content discovery score: 8 out of 10
Does Pluto TV make it easy to move between categories?
Pluto TV keeps its content categories in its left-hand menu, which has the following choices: Now Watching, Home, Channel Guide, On Demand, Search, Kids Mode, Settings, and Account. These are more or less the choices I expect to see when moving through the Pluto TV interface, and the key element that I think all free streamers need to offer — a shortcut to immediately jump to either live channels or on-demand content — is found here. Not much to complain about from the perspective of switching between content categories.
Category switching score: 8.5 out of 10
How are Pluto TV’s playback controls?
The Pluto TV playback controls seem rudimentary at first, but there’s more here than meets the eye. To start with, when you pull them up, all you see is the pause button, a playback progress bar that shows where commercial breaks will be inserted, and that’s about it. But if you scroll over to the three-dot menu on the right side of the progress bar, you can pull up an extra menu with more options.
This supplementary menu has Info, Audio & Subtitles menu, the ability to add to your Watch List, or the ability to start the TV episode or movie from the beginning. It offers a large amount of control during playback, and it was more than I expected from Pluto TV when I started this exercise.
Pluto TV’s playback controls include quite a few options.
Playback controls score: 9 out of 10
Does Pluto TV make it easy to skip opening and closing credits?
Unfortunately, at no point did I see a way to skip any opening or closing credits on any title on Pluto TV. You can either fast-forward manually or sit through the credits and wait for them to end. This is the type of feature that some free streamers like Pluto TV simply don’t include, but considering how pleasantly surprised I was by the Pluto playback controls, this disappointed me.
Ease of skipping credits score: 0 out of 10
Final thoughts
There were some things I thought Pluto TV did well in this exercise, and I came into it fully expecting not to have anything positive to say. The autoplay issues really weighed down the experience for me, but once I got past those, I found Pluto TV fairly simple to use, easy to navigate around, and even equipped with some surprisingly good user controls.
However, the autoplay issues count against the score, as does the fact that you have no way to skip credits on Pluto TV. That will probably be a frequent problem while reviewing free streaming services, but it makes watching on the streaming service an unquestionably less fun experience.
