Cravetv.caReviews 468

I rated 1 since I cant go any lower. Using the website is a painful ordeal when it comes to streaming. I have fairly good internt speed in my house, so for a site that's only proving 720p, should be able to stream any show flawlessly, but this is not the case, every show is prone to brutal freezing or slow load times. Issues are too consistent, I will be cancelling my subscription asap. To say any more would be beating a dead horse, to who ever reads this, do not waste your time and money.

On my Samsung Smart TV, Crave is simply broken. Content often won't load no matter how many times I try to access it. Once it does load, fast forwarding and rewinding is incredibly slow and prone to freezing. If you back out of the content, you lose your place and have to start from the beginning, and fast forwarding is at best 4x speed (15 minutes to get to the end of an hour). If you sign out, you need a smart device to reconnect your account to the app completely. As for the quality of content? HBO streams at a heavily compressed 720p and it looks like absolute garbage. DO NOT SPEND ONE PENNY ON THIS SERVICE.

When I subbed to Crave in Dec '18(I left Netflix because of the Bobs Burgers thing), I had looked through their catalogue and said "okay not bad, they're always adding stuff I'm sure". Six months later and I have exhausted my interest and their catalogue! Click on "collections" and you'll see 'hundreds' of titles in the numbers displayed but if you actually count them, they fall wayyy short. Critically Acclaimed for example boasts 97 ITEMS but upon full count of the items one only gets to 33 just a hair over 1/3 of what is advertised

Problems in point form:
-highest quality setting is 720p via the browser, unacceptable 1080p should be a minimum.
-Search function sucks, if you know you are looking for a title that is a documentary, you should be able to search only in documentaries
-There is no app for windows 10, unacceptable, if every other streaming service has it, so should crave
-price is too high. All I care about are the HBO shows, why can't I just buy access to those? It just makes this company seem greedy

All that being said, it's sad, because the content on Crave is amazing, but it is ruined by such a terrible service that makes it more convenient to just pirate what I am looking for.

The only decent thing about their service is their content library which are mostly HBO shows. That's the only positive thing though as pretty much every other aspect of their service is absolute garbage. The app is a horrible and unintuitive mess, the quality looks like a 2008 You tube video. It constantly lags and the play back controls are garbage. I'm paying $17 for Netflix which has more content and way better quality. Bell accrued the solo rights for HBO content in Canada and is abusing and ripping off Canadians while paying off the government entities that oversee these sort of things. Do yourself a favour get a VPN and just download Game of thrones and don't give your money to these greedy $#*!ers.

Oh what a surprise - a Canadian version of a successful concept that's nowhere near as good as all the other options out there. Horrible interface - I have a brand new, Samsung 4K TV, so it's not the TV - can't fast forward or rewind programmes, if you put a programme in your "My Cravings " section, you can ONLY watch the next episode. If you want to watch a different episode, you have to search for the series all over again. The screen dims and stays dim after the first episode finishes, so you have to watch a dimmed next episode unless you want to stop it and research the series all over again. Don't support this. Hopefully it will go out of business and be a valuable lesson to Canadian businesses wanting to compete in this highly competitive market. Either come correct or don't bother, Crave.

I do not normally write these kind of things but I am the General Manager of an Ecom business and I deal with Customer Service complaints all the time. I called the help line because I could not watch game of thrones on my Samsung tv but I can watch it on my laptop. The lady I spoke with would not listen to anything I was saying. She kept having me log in and log out log in an log out. Telling me I have to watch it on air (which was not working). I then tried to explain that I can watch it on my lap top. When I asked for her name she just put me on hold. I have now been on the phone for 40 mins and still have not got an answer to my question. This is horrible customer service! I guess I have to watch it on my laptop. After almost an hour on the phone I still do not know why! Oh great now she disconnected me... WOW

The shows you can actually watch are laggy and stop working constantly. Watching anything longer than 20 minutes is impossible because of the frustration of having to back out to the menu and restart every 5 minutes. The whole point of paying for a service is that it is supposed to be better quality than what you can find to download for free, so that you want to keep paying for the quality. Torrenting episodes is not only free, gut the quality is 100x better than what you get paying for Crave. Most useless, greedy, waste of money service out there. Go for Netflix if you want to pay for quality. You wont get that with your money on this service.

Absolute garbage. When streaming on a computer with a 150Mbit downstream, everything is 720p at best, though it sometimes looks like standard definition. I only subscribed to watch Game of Thrones, but the $#*!e quality and lack of alternative providers in Canada quite honestly forces me to torrent the show instead. Hopefully the fact that I paid for the right to watch it will stave off any lawsuits from HBO. Also, don't subscribe through Bell Aliant, if you ever forget your password you're absolutely $#*!ed. Crave's tech support can't help you, and Bell Aliant informs you that you have to contact Crave. Just a recursive loop of futility. I can't speak for other providers, but if you have to pick between subscribing directly with Crave and subscribing through Bell, pick Crave, at least then their tech support will actually be able to help you, otherwise the poor bastards can't even pull up your account.

Added a $100 and a $25 gift card for my niece for her birthday. The $100 gift card receipt says I paid $100, the credit card company says I paid $100. Value on Crave TV when they redeemed it is $50. This was almost 10 days ago. Each time I call (5 times) they tell me that the ticket has been escalated and they'll get back to me in 24 hours. They have yet to contact me within 24 hours. Today I asked to speak to a supervisor since, spending 2 hours on hold and 3 hours talking with their agents is finally wearing very thin on me. They hung up on me. I called back and I'm now waiting to get a call-back from a supervisor. Since they had a 1 month free trial period, I asked if they could just extend for a week while they sort this out and they said no. I said they can take the week away after this is sorted out... I just don't want them to get a bad impression of crave, they said no. I asked them to finish their investigation and return all my money. I will be sure to warn everyone how poor my customer service experience has been with them.