British Film Institute Reviews 36

It’s just another subscription on Amazon with a small catalogue.

The fatal flaw of the British Film Institute or BFI Player as with every other subscription is that they don’t hold the rights to many films so the catalogue is limited.

The most insidious thing about this platform though is that even after subscribing a large amount of the films are behind another paywall and they need to be rented at additional cost. Films like Adulthood which are over 15 years old and not even that good need to be rented for £3.50 a pop, a new release like Wasteman 2026 that’s £16 rental! Thats absolutely disgraceful that a paid subscriber would have to pay another £16 to watch one film!

It’s just greed at the end of the day, have a Amazon subscription that’s not enough you need to subscribe to 10 or more smaller platforms like BFI Player and even then you probably will have to rent the films you actually want to see.

I don’t rate BFI Player, I watched Brides, ‘If I had legs I would kick you’ and a few old films like Scum, then there was just nothing else I wanted to watch or the things I would watch were behind further paywalls. I’ve given it a few months but there doesn’t seem to be much new content, the new releases are mostly trashy programmes from 50 or more years ago and a few releases that are B-Movies at best.

I don’t see any reason to keep the subscription, I would resent a film that I wanted so watch being locked behind this Subscription. I will be buying a DVD player I think and building up my personal collection again so I am not reliant on these greedy subscription services.

I have never liked the BFI website and it plunged even further in my estimation two days ago. The day when April bookings opened for members. The Mark Kermode event listed for 13th April in the programme guide for April was nowhere to be seen on the booking page. I tried a search (which never works) and then the IMax page. Nothing. I tried phoning the Box Office and, VERY long story short, wasted nearly an hour on hold without getting an answer. Then emailed the Box Office and got a single line answer that the event had been moved back a fortnight. No apology, no explanation. I was disgusted with such rubbish customer service, given that I regularly receive emails from the BFI. Nothing about this, though. Despite it being an event that typically sells out very quickly. No wonder the BFI gets such awful Trustpilot ratings, which never seem to elicit a response.

I had a gift subscription for a year . Problems from the start as i had to continually restart my fire stick to get the homepage to work. I stupidly renewed & now it won't go beyond trailers on my tv but works on my laptop,
As others have said there is no customer support. No phone , chat which is unmanned & e mails to which you receive no response.
I've cancelled for the future & am now trying to get my money back. Paid on a credit card & they are to initiate charge back

shocking App, managed to watch 1/2 film on my Samsung TV. Went in next day to finish the film and
a) could not 'resume', b) could not FF to the point where we wished to resume and c) kept crashing.
Cancelled my subscription.

Disappointed as there appeared to be some great film available.

Online booking system is a farce. Refused two different cards for different reasons. Useless.

I subscribed to the BFI player several years ago but eventually became a little tired of the bugs that meant that sometimes you could not watch the films you had paid to rent at all. I recently subscribed again, assuming things would be better, and discovered they have actually got far worse. After much perseverence I have managed to watch two films, but have had to abandon trying to watch several others. Each one required restarting the app multiple times and going to my account to remove the single associated device to get rid of the error message saying too many devices were registered. If BFI wanted to destroy the experience of watching films then they have found an excellent way to do this. Since there are so many good streaming platforms out there, and since the BFI player has been so poor for so many years without them doing anything about it, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that BFI really don't care. Such a shame.

I would give it zero stars if I could. The app simply does not work. It takes my money, I set up a password, and it says I don’t have an active subscription. I’ve tried this multiple times, and it simply does not work. I give up. Donn don’t waste your time. And certainly don’t send them any money.

The bfi website is awful specially the booking page . An ordeal , of course it crashes for high demand tickets .
But it you get through you can’t even get two tickets at once , you have to select one seat , choose the type , add to your basket , then go back to booking page and select another ticket which of course by then is already gone.
Also it logs you out for no reason
Membership is useless , I’ve never been able to book during membership presale ,
They removed the second tier membership , now you either choose the very expensive membership or the cheap one that everyone has , pathetic

Basically the catalogue is good but the app is absolutely useless so you can spend more time trying to sort issues than watching films.

I was experiencing issues pairing the app to my Samsung TV the support and assistance provided to me after I contacted BFI was first class needless to say I am now up and running thanks to the support I recieved

The BFI is great. The website is RIDICULOUS. Very hard to choose seats on mobile because the seat map is so tiny. The family ticket option is very confusing because they say they're for an adult and a child but then you still have to buy two of them. At checkout I could not update any of my information without getting an internal server error, so I had to register a new account with a different email address which it said was not a valid email address (wtf) and then finally, finally made it through on the third try. Btw I had to use a laptop to do it because the mobile site was so hard to navigate. Plus there were other errors along the way, and at one point the site emptied my basket so I had to start over from the beginning. Frustrating enough to leave a review and honestly to be put off booking at the BFI in the future. Awful, awful, awful.

The app is an abomination. No idea why they don’t hire someone to redo from scratch.

Get a loan and hire proper coders! Hire marketing and PR to help you get out the word on the new and improved app experience and great film selection!

So many households are cancelling Prime, Netflix etc. and want to support British companies. Get it together or miss the boat. People are out here cancelling BFI because the app and experience sucks. That’s it. Fix it! There’s no excuse for how bad this streaming experience is. The best movie selection in the world wouldn’t be enough to endure this frustration.

App on my TV is basically useless. Thank god I'm only on a free trial and can cancel. Constantly shows error codes, freezes, says I have too many devices when I don't... It's just a complete mess.

Try harder guys. We have high speed fibre optic yet we can’t watch a film without the app constantly freezing. We then get error codes with ‘too many devices’ when we only use this on our TV. In this day and age this type of substandard service is just ludicrous. Be better.

I’m referring to their streaming app here…..Anything worth watching you have to pay extra . A compete swizz, unless you are interested in boring old reels about Milton Keynes being built, or quite frankly utter rubbish films that look like they are made by 6th form drama students trying to be edgy then don’t waste your money much better content on YouTube FREE
73% of one star reviews says it all

Booking via the app is now even more painful than before it was redesigned last year. Logging on via the queue is prolonged, no matter at what early point one joins - I don't know what the knack is to get nearer the front but I don't have it! Then registering and accessing the dates chosen is all agonisingly slow. As for the payment, I had to resubmit and confirm 4 times before it was accepted. Just awful.

Given the scale of their programme the BFI should enable faster selection and processing via a more powerful and well designed process.

I was so excited about getting BFI player and all the films I was going to watch. I watched a few during the free trial but since I got a subscription I have been unable to watch anything. The idea is to watch films not endlessly troubleshoot IT issues. So, £50 paid up front to watch a wheel go round and be told I have exceeded the number of devices I can log in on. The limit is 4; I have used 2. I have contacted them to ask for a refund. Watch this space...

I love it. Bought a subscription a couple of weeks ago and have already watched four high quality films. Have been using the ‘Kermode Presents’ to help choose, which has been great. Have had no technical problems at all (I’ve been using Airplay to stream it to my TV from my phone).

The app is appalling, which is a shame given the quality of content on BFI Player.
There's no option to access your watchlist, nor can you watch rentals on the app.
Plus, whenever I watch a film, it cuts out abruptly and the app crashes. It happens at random and is infuriating given that I pay for a subscription. I've just cancelled it because I'm sick of being booted out of films.

It seems is very difficult to install to use with a Fire TV. I have just wasted an hour and a half trying to get it to recognise that I have subscribed and allow me to even use the app. However after resetting passwords on Amazon, clearing the cache on iPhone safari and on the FireTV 3 times, it eventually came up with a token recognised by the system and then paired.
The support at BFI were quite helpful but what should be quick and easy is made frustrating and tedious. Furthermore, if the QR code is used it takes you to Moviplex and gets you to subscribe to that with a 7 day free trial that looks similar the the BFI offering however, this costs £23 per month after 10 days. BFI need to ensure this cannot happen.
All in all highly frustrating and when complete I found BFI didn't actually have the movie I wanted, with the result I'm somewhat pissed off with them.
However, I have updated my rating to 2 stars because they at least have some working support.