Acorn TV

I have tried repeatedly to cancel the service - logging in directs to a blank landing page - no option to cancel?

This is possibly the most impossible subscription to cancel but perhaps they make it difficult so you can't?

We are a huge fan of British television, going way back to the 70s and Monty Python, the Goonies, Fawlty Towers, the Two Ronnies, etc. So we were excited to see that we could view again some of these shows on Britbox and Acorn TV through Amazon Prime Video. We did the free week with Britbox and then subscribed for two months until we had exhausted all the episodes of all the shows we wanted to watch. Next, we did the free week with Acorn and have now subscribed for a month to watch Vera, Foyle's War, and others not available on Britbox. The two services are night and day. We use new Roku's to stream. We never had one issue with Britbox. We have daily issues with Acorn. Buffering, choking, restarting, and when you finally are able to get through an episode, the app freezes and doesn't return to the menu. Not only that, you have to exit back to the main Roku home menu (top right button) to recover the device. I had read numerous complaints about Acorn and their buggy app. The same thing happens on Firestick which I have a new one installed. I sent an email to Acorn customer service but got no response, not even an email saying they received my email and are working on it. Also, not all of the Foyle's War episodes have closed captioning/subtitles even though they are ALL marked as having such. I am hearing impaired and the thick British accents make it impossible to understand. When these air on PBS or are played from our library's DVDs, they all have subtitles. I feel we are being cheated of the money we are spending. We will not be renewing the subscription. Britbox has it down and does it correctly. Acorn is a fail!

Let me put it to you this way; let's say you find an ad for a place that offers the sort of pizza you like at a very good price. You order one and you like it. Now the pizza company tells you that you can get these pizzas as often as you like for a good price if you give them your credit card info. You are OK with that and sure enough the pizzas start arriving when you want them.

Everything is OK until comes the day (and you can read the other reviews my friends because that day WILL come) when you order the pizza and it does not come. Your initial response it to call the pizza shop. Good luck finding the number they only communicate with you through robo generated email that direct you to their website tech support FAQs. You go to their website and navigate and try their one-size-fits-all solutions and still no pizza.

You write your own email to tell them you still have no pizza and they robo-respond with another email directing you to their website FAQ and this time they tell you they are working on it.

You give them a few days to work on it while you continue to order more pizzas which never arrive. You write again asking for a phone number where you can reach a person.

You hear nothing and then... you get another email declaring your problem solved and asking you how you liked their service!

As I write this I still have no pizza, I am still paying for it and I have given them one final chance to fix it.

Someday Acorn will be modestly famous as either a B-school case study of how a good plan poorly executed failed miserably or how a group of smart people, finding their product out of control managed to turn it around and made it successful.

In the meantime, if you haven't signed up yet, I suggest you give it another year, come back to this site, read the reviews and make your decision. But as for now, save your money.

Joined Acorn tv's 7 day free trial as I love British TV and fully intended to subscribe if it lived up to it's hype. Filled in all my details including my email etc... got to the point where I could log in and start enjoying the myriad of content advertised only to be told my email was invalid. Tried again, same response. Dumped cache, reloaded to no avail. Frustrated I took a break to read some emails before deciding what to try next and to give the site a chance to catch up with my trial application. One of my emails was from Acorn Tv welcoming me and urging me to get started by following a link provided. Relieved I thought that might have been the issue, I needed to use the link provided... So I clicked, it took me to same page as before and once again my email was invalid... WTH? Obviously this was my email as they had sent me the welcoming email... I had had enough frustration for one day, decided to give it 24 hrs before attempting to log in again. Same result, email invalid. This is when I went online to see if anyone had experienced the same thing... I was met by an avalanche of frustrated would be subscribers warning people NOT to subscribe. Heaps of people were unable to actually view any content for one reason or another and ALL of them warned that customer service was virtually non existent. So many had been stung by Acorn taking money from their linked accounts (which you need to provide when applying for the 7 day trial) and continuing to do so long after they had cancelled their subscription. I wrote to Acorn tv informing them of my inability to log in and was met with a wall of silence, no response for a couple of days. I wrote again informing them that I was cancelling my trial subscription as I had not been able to access any content due to the log in issue and advising them not to attempt to take any money from me... No response. A day later I get a request from them to 'tell them how much I am enjoying the service'... At this point I knew that we had a problem and I decided to cancel the credit card attached to my trial subscription. Almost immediately (and before the 7 days were up) I got an email to advise that an attempt had been made to charge my card which had not gone thru and if I didn't want to lose my subscription I should remedy the situation. Next day, second email arrived advising same thing... I will NOT be going anywhere near this service in the future despite my love of British Tv and would advise others to stay clear...