Streaming Tips

The settings streaming apps bury: autoplay, subtitles, downloads, and the Continue Watching row that never forgets anything.

Every guide here gives the exact menu path, and lists the phone, the browser and the television separately, because on most services they are genuinely different screens with different options. A large share of the frustration around these settings comes from following an instruction written for one of the three while sitting in front of another.

Two recurring details explain most of the confusion. The first is that many of these settings belong to the profile rather than to the account, so a change made on one profile looks like it failed when someone else watches. The second is that several settings people assume live in the app actually live in the device: subtitle size and colour on most platforms are an operating system setting, which is why changing them once changes them everywhere.

Where a service has quietly removed a control, we say so rather than sending you looking for a switch that is no longer there. That is the least satisfying kind of answer to publish and it is more useful than a menu path that leads to an empty screen.