Review: The Bell Fibe TV App
If you’ve been keeping tabs on yours truly dumping Rogers, you’ll recall that as part of my move to Bell, they snuck in the Fibe TV app along with six months free of Crave TV which is Bell’s streaming service. I use the word “snuck” because if you read my post on that, they literally gave me a price for Internet and home phone, didn’t speak to the Fibe TV app until I got an email saying that I was paying $10 a month for the Fibe TV app with a basic TV package. But the price I was quoted on the phone was the price that was in the email.
That’s pretty sneaky.
You may also recall that at the time I got my Bell Internet and home phone installed, Fibe TV wasn’t working because they had yet to create an account number for me. That I found to be weird but whatever. But that changed on Monday where Bell sent me an email asking me to create a MyBell account. The thing was that I had done this last week. However something was messed up with it so I had to delete it and recreate it. When I did, I had a Bell account number and I was able to get Fibe TV working. Now the Fibe TV is available to you in three ways:
- You can log in here on the web via a web browser.
- You can download the Fibe TV app for iOS and Android
- You can use an Apple TV 4K, Amazon Fire TV Stick, An Android TV, or a Google Chromecast. Strangely, Roku isn’t on that list.
Since Roku isn’t on that list, I went the route of using the iOS app for the majority of my testing. Downloading it and setting it up now that I had a working MyBell profile. Using the credentials for that I was able to log in and get up and running. Here’s the first thing that I saw:
Here you can see the programming that is currently live or “trending” according to Bell. Plus you can see their suggestions for both normal TV and Crave TV.
If scrolling to see what’s on right now by channel is your thing, this screen allows you to do that.
If however you want to pick a channel and see what shows are available on demand on that channel, then this screen will allow you to do that.
For example if I check CTV, here’s a sample on what’s available on demand.
You can create a watchlist of the series or movies that you want to see, as well as download episodes to your phone or tablet for data free viewing. By default the ability to watch and download on cellular networks is turned off. But if you have a better data plan than most of us, you can turn that functionality on and watch TV anywhere.
The bottom line is all of this is easy to navigate and easily find the content that you’re looking for.
Now, because of the lack of a Roku TV app, was I was prepared to criticize that. But this feature made me rethink that:
This app supports AirPlay and Casting which is a welcome addition to make up for the fact that Fibe TV doesn’t support the biggest streaming TV platform on the planet.
So how does this app work? It works very well as I had no issues streaming content to my TV via AirPlay. So from a technical standpoint, this app works fine. Ditto for watching TV via the website. That method allowed me to stream content on both my PC and Mac via a browser.
The Fibe TV app with what Bell calls their “Standard” package is $14.95 a month. Though I am getting a $4.95 credit as I am with Bell for Internet. Making this $10 a month. That gives you local TV and a few other channels which is fine as my wife and I don’t watch TV a whole lot. But if you want to watch anything interesting, you’re going to have to pay. For example, Crave TV is an extra $20 a month. But I am getting a $20 credit until the new year which makes it free until then. Crave TV gives me access to some movies and HBO shows among other things. I guess that would be cool for some people. But with the exception of a handful of movies, the things that my wife and I want to watch are exclusively available on other streaming services. Thus this will be cancelled when we’re done watching the shows and movies that Crave TV offers.
Speaking of which, Bell has a very interesting strategy at work here. I want to find out what some of their channels cost. But instead of displaying a price, I got this:
You’ll note that instead of displaying a price, it tells you to go to mybell.ca or phone them. I don’t like speaking to Bell humans because of how aggressive they are, so I went to mybell.ca and found that regular broadcast channels are $4-$5 a month each, sports channels are roughly $10 a month. Plus there are packages available that bundle together a bunch of channels for one place.
So, what do I think of the Fibe TV app? I think it’s fine for people like my wife and I who don’t watch a whole lot of broadcast TV. As I mentioned earlier, we’ll be nuking the Crave TV subscription once we finished streaming all the things and keep the app for the few times we need to watch local TV. But if I could give Bell once piece of advice, they should really do a Roku app given the size of that streaming platform in Canada.
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