App review: Discovery Channel

review by Eric Nguyen

The Discovery Channel app is best thought of as the Discovery Channel’s YouTube channel, if it had one. The first thing you see once the program loads is a list of clips from various Discovery Channel shows such as Man vs. Wild, Deadliest Catch, and Mythbusters. These aren’t actual episodes, but rather short clips, each only a couple minutes long. For example, the current most-viewed video is titled “Moments of Impact: Big Cat Attack,” and is a couple minutes worth of an captured African leopard’s escape and attempt to climb into a ranger’s car through the driver’s side window. There are about 30 seconds of actual video in there, but the slow-motion replay and narration lengthen it to a couple minutes. This is perhaps the best way to watch the Discovery Channel: in short snippets with limited commercial interruption, varied enough that it’s impossible to become bored.

In fact, once you start playing a video from a list (say, Latest Videos or a particular TV show), after a short pause at the end of each clip, the next one will start—so, it’s a lot like watching a really varied Discovery Channel episode. There are some commercials that play in front of videos, but they only show up every once in a while. The problems with the video content involve the formatting and processing of the videos, rather than the videos themselves. First, I noticed a couple videos with noise levels that were much louder or softer than normal. This wasn’t too big of a problem, but given that the makers of the app also control all of the content, it shouldn’t be that difficult to standardize all of the videos. The second issue I noticed had to do with how each video looked on screen. The quality was fine for an iPhone screen, but by default the video size is smaller than the screen itself, leaving black borders all around the video. It is easily possible to zoom in so that the video fills the screen horizontally, but that should be done by default.

The app also has other features less-related to video clips. The most useful of these are the Discovery Channel TV schedules. You can see the schedule for the rest of the day, or if you’re searching by show, you can see the next time that show will air. It’s pretty useful if you don’t want to have to use a TV guide. Other features include quizzes, Discovery Channel photo galleries, and science news (in video format). Of course, these are not the main attraction of the program—that would most definitely be the video clips.

Speaking of video, it’s important to remember that this app is doesn’t have any actual TV shows in it, just short clips. It does, however, have links directly to each show in the iTunes Store, so if you really like a clip you can easily get more, albeit for money.

Overall, it’s safe to say that the Discovery Channel app is a great way to soak up some time while waiting for the bus. The video clips are short enough that you can probably fit one in before the bus comes, yet still long enough to be interesting. The extra features are icing on the cake. If the app creators could figure out a way to fix the video issues this app would be pretty great. Also nice would be a simpler interface—currently, some important functionality (like video search) is buried in the ‘More’ tab. It’s good to know that it’s there, but a good iPhone app should also have core functionality such as that be intuitively accessible. In the meantime, though, I’ll definitely be keeping this app.

The Discovery Channel app is available for free in the App Store.