PlayOn Reviews 

As many others have said- the company sold a lifetime service that they just decided to stop supporting so that one needs to subscribe to a new but identical service. If they had just said there was an annual subscription, I may have considered subscribing. But to represent a “lifetime” service and then switch it shows how deceptive they are.

Costumer service is a joke. I've trying to contact them so I can download movies already recorded into their cloud and no response whatsoever. I gave up!! Luckly I did not sign for a year.

I bought a lifetime subscription for their service/product. PlayOn released an identical program (does the exact same thing, looks the exact same, etc.) with a different name and indicated they are no longer supporting their old product. Lifetime subscribers have been scammed.

Got scammed like so many others. Paid for a lifetime use of playon desktop, only to find out that playon desktop is now worthless and you must pay monthly to be able to record anything from services you already pay for.

I purchased a lifetime PlayOn subscription. I could no longer record shows and saw an "update" was available. Installed the update. Noticed it now said Play on Home after the install. I tried to record a show and got a message that I need to subscribe to PlayOn Home for that to work. This is very deceptive and not a company to be trusted. I am done with them forever.

Several years ago I bought a "lifetime" subscription for PlayOn which initially worked quite well. Although I recorded a few movies with it, I never really spent a lot of time or effort playing with it. Recently I regained interest in some series I wanted to capture to watch while I was traveling. I downloaded and installed the latest version and for the most part the program did what it was supposed to do, although I forgot how long it took to record these programs. Then I started to have problems. It would not log on to my streaming services, even though it prominently displayed their logos in the menu. When I could log on, PlayOn seemed to download even slower than before (I have a gigabit internet connection) even when I prioritized my laptop on my router. Now came the kicker, I recently upgraded my computer's OS to Win 11 I suddenly found out my 'lifetime' subscription 'died'. PlayOn desktop DOES NOT WORK on Win 11. I sent an email to customer support and was told they were not planning on continuing the desktop version with Win 11, but that they would 'gladly' give me 3 months free to their new "PlayOn Home" subscription based app. Of course, I can still use my 'lifetime subscription PlayOn' on Windows 10 & 7, but...WTH? Since I was having problems with my current version on Win 10 and it doesn't work on Win 11, I figured I might as well bite the bullet and subscribe to PlayOn Home. Exactly 2 minutes after I subscribed to this new service, downloaded and installed it, I was having the same problems logging into my streaming services. In addition, my audio was no longer working on my computer. For some reason, PlayOn had changed my audio settings. It took me 15 minutes to correct this. Once corrected, I immediately removed PlayOn from my system and cancelled the new subscription. PlayOn is nothing short of a scam and piece of crap app. I then checked my registry and found remnants of PlayOn scattered throughout. I decided to completely wipe my computer and reinstall Win 11 to rid my computer of anything to do with PlayOn. My advice to everyone is to stay far away from this app.

THIS IS WHAT I WROTE TO PLAYON WHEN I CANCELLED MY SERVICE ( AFTER ABOUT 2 MONTHS OF USING THIS SERVICE).
I cancelled my plan with you today due to not receiving responses (or comprehensible responses) from your support representatives. For example, I upgraded my cloud storage memory and was charged for this, but never received the upgrade.
I contacted support about this problem 3x over a 2 week period, with no response.
I also need subtitles with the backups as I'm a senior and have a hearing loss. But only a few of the movie backups contained subtitles although I always made sure to turn the subtitles on before backing up my movies.
HOWEVER, not being able to access movies on multiple streaming services was my main reason for cancelling my services. Spending hours trying to back up movies when playon was not working with specific streaming services was extremely time consumimg and frustrating. If I had recieved some customer support when this was happening I wouldn't have cancelled my services. I did eventually receive a couple of notices that playon was not currently working with one or more of the streaming services I subscribed to. But these notices were only posted (not emailed or texted to me) on the playon site after I spent hours and hours trying to backup my movies.
As other customers have mentioned in their playon reviews, when I reported a problem the support reps emailed me a lot of questions and then provided a lot of highly technical and mostly incomprehensible recommendations. Their recommendations never seemed to have any practical answers to the many problems with the services I purchased.
Please make sure that both my cloud and desktop services with playon are cancelled.
I believe your services have potential and I feel that I was extremely patient about handling the many problems but at some point even very patient people have to call it quits. Very disappointed.
Robert Berry

I was with Playon Desktop & Cloud products for about 6 months. The Playon products still have a lot of problems to be solved. It gets frustrating when always having to restart the app to bypass a problem. Notifying Playon Support group is painful. There's a large resistance for support to read the described problem and thus to help you. In fact, their last response to me was "If your not from US, then we will not support you". They were happy to take my money but when it comes to fixing their products Playon is really bad. :-(

had it working for years, all the sudden after their update no longer worked. Tried to blame on my hardware even though built in server in win 10 works great with same files. Built in server has much better picture quality and will work independent of internet. As for customer service whats that?

I have had this service for several years. During that time I have recorded over 10,000 episodes ranging from some short 15 minute PBS Astronomy shows to movies lasting over 2 hours. Every time I have had a problem (very few) they have helped us out.

If you are interested in building a library of your favorite programs this program is for you. My usage has driven my per episode cost down to less than 4/10s of a penny, or about 12 cents for a complete season of 30 shows. Where are you going to find many bargains like that?

Give Playon a try, and if you want to build your favorite shows, you will have also found a great TV viewer. You have the option of removing ads on those shows that still show them and thereby speed up your TV viewing time by around 15 to 20 %

A total waste of time can't even sign up emails go unanswered now I'm glad I didn't.

STAY AWAY FROM THIS SERVICE!!! CUSTOMER SERVICE IS A JOKE. DO NOT BUY. NO ONE CAN HELP YOU, ALL THEY DO IS SEND OUT EMAIL AFTER EMAIL TELLING YOU THAT THE ARE LOOKING INTO THE ISSUE. MY ISSUE WAS ACCOUNT IP LOCKOUT DUE TO INCORRECT PASSWORD ENTERED TOO MANY TIMES. BEEN OVER 2 WEEKS NOW AND STILL NO ONE THERE IS ABLE TO UNLOCK THE ACCOUNT. LOL BIG JOKE!!!!!!!

PlayOn advertises the ability to record video from sites like Amazon, Netflix, CBS, and more. In theory? GREAT service. Really!

In practice? This service and it's support is, well, rather horrible to say the least. As a (paid) service member for over two years now, I can say , without a doubt that this is , by far, one of the worst things I've seen in my years of working with software.

The staff behind this software have a set of templates that they use to reply to customers. Don't jump through their hoops to submit a ticket? You won't get a valid response... Just a cut and paste one telling you to do things differently

The staff behind this software repeatedly reject proof of their software causing problems, claiming that it's the user, or something on the user's end, or that "we can't duplicate it". Not being able to duplicate an issue doesn't make it not an issue, or not an issue with the software itself.

The staff behind this software repeatedly take weeks to resolve critical issues (such as software locking up computer), and instead of leaving tickets open to notify the customer of an issue being resolved , CLOSE said tickets immediately. When questioned, they simply say to "check our changelog" (which they frequently do not update)

The staff behind this software repeatedly block users from social media posts, simply because said user dares to disagree with staff publicly, then threaten to cut off support because a user has 'been rude' to staff (hardly). If you don't subscribe to, and support their Utopian lie, well, you're 'rude' to them.

Recently, they've removed their customer forums, simply because they can't handle the negative feedback from the majority of customers. Rather than address issues properly, they'd rather just hide them and pretend they don't exist

I'll give you a fine example of how this product's "support" works:

Towards the end of January 2020, I reported an issue with their product. Provided proof of the issue being caused by their product (video proof of certain actions locking the PC). The issue was acknowledged and I was informed that it was able to be reproduced by some of the members on their team (not all). The ticket was then closed, shelved, nothing since

As of today (May 9th, 2020), that major issue (what else would you call something that locks up a user PC) has not been fixed. I've asked twice and their response has been the same:

"it's hard to fix this one because we cannot replicate it everywhere".

This group of "developers' has no idea what they're doing, no clue how to manage anything, and no right trying to sell a product that is harmful to the end user's computer. They take WEEKS to resolve critical network (cbs/amazon/etc) issues, and MONTHS to resolve critical PC issues!

Do NOT, I repeat NOT give these people your money!

*edit - July 6, 2020*
That issue I posted in January to them? STILL not resolved, and it has started to affect more and more people.

The "staff" behind this software really have ZERO clue