BBC Maestro User Reviews

What users say

Top reviews

Mint-deluxe

Shared hands on learned experience - fact not theory.

Nice videos. Buggy app and expensive.

The quality of the videos is good, with nice extra reading material from the experts; however, the app is very buggy after you watch a video. It's very frustrating to go to the next video or to come back to the main menu if you want to watch a different video. I always end up closing the app altogether and then going back in to get to the main menu.

The other thing I'm not so keen on is the subscription. Why can't you just pay once? Everything has to be a subscription now. Let's pay for the rest of our lives, shall we?
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Anxious Self

What an enlightening , informative course. It has enabled me to reflect on who I am and why I get anxious in certain situations. I am looking forward to working along side my anxious self to apply a steadier , calmer approach to many aspects on my everyday life. Hopefully feeling more contentment

Excellent

I like how the talks are broken down into bite size chapters. I’ve been listening to the lesson about anxiety. The content has been excellent; informative and easy to follow.

A few bugs

Love the content so far, but there's a bug that requires me to open the account page every time I open the app in order to get it to load the fact that I have a paid membership. Also, there seems to be a bug with syncing my last viewed video. Also, a spinner sometimes shows over the video until I close and reopen it.
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Great content but horrible app

Just such a bad app. They really need to work on this. Again, the review is for the app not the content.

App issues

Despite having a subscription and being signed into my account, every time I try to watch a lesson it asks me to sign in and takes me around in circles.

Nice app, varied content but too pricey

This is a great app if you want to learn a bit about a broad variety of topics.

The experts are great, the content is well presented. I’ve subscribed for a couple of years. It’s a good selection from a trusted brand.

Unfortunately the annual subscription cost is too high to make it a viable long term auto-renew for me. This app has a value certainly, but not at the current full price point. I hope the developer reflects on this as, if more affordable, I’d continue to subscribe on auto-renew rather than what I’ve switched to - subscription gaps/relying on my memory to remember to subscribe in future. Hope that helps!
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Great value

High-quality format and strong instructors. Hooked!

Defaulting to landscape is frustrating

The content is really good so far and I enjoy listening to it like a podcast because the video in my current lesson is just talking heads, doesn’t show me anything more than an audio book would. So it’s frustrating that when pressing play it automatically throws my phone in landscape viewer, making it difficult to switch apps and lessons.
Personally I’d find it more usable if it defaults to a vertical player with episode info/other episode list underneath. And give me the option to play landscape if I’d like to.

An example is trying to listen to it as a podcast but using gps navigation. Switching apps shouldn’t throw my phone into landscape mode it’s not ideal.

Otherwise good content and app.
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What am I watching?

It’s hard to navigate to courses that interest me because I can’t even tell (from the interface) what the courses are.

So far, the content of the courses I’ve watched so far is excellent. The app, itself, is the problem and the reason for the low rating.

Offering a list view or options for organizing a table of contents by subject matter would improve my user experience quite a bit. Now I just feel like I spend more time browsing and navigating than I do learning.

Great potential, awkward execution.
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Courses good but app not so good

I am enjoying the courses but I constantly get thrown out and have to reengage even though I’m logged in.
It will be a long year if it’s not fixed

Limited course selection

The courses on this platform are not updated very often. Nicely filmed and put together but not worth the spend, limited selection, celeb courses but not impressive enough for the asking subscription fee.

Great Inspiration

I’ve been wanting to write a fiction story for quite some time now, but I didn’t know where or how to begin. Thanks to a commercial that I saw with Harlan Coben advertising for his BBC Maestro course, I got started and I am half way done! It’s an inspirational course and a great resource. I can’t wait to finish and publish my book.
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Great content

The content is great. Getting different spective from authors is invaluable. The only complaint I have is the app can be a little flakey

Landscape and progression

The content is great but this is about the app itself. It defaults to landscape, which is fine for the video, but makes it difficult to open and close the app. And it isn’t easy to progress from one lesson to the next. Both of these issues make it difficult to safely just set it to play whilst driving, if you just want to listen to it.

How do you get it to go straight onto the next episode by default?
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Enjoyable learning

Excellent range of courses with the best teachers. Really engaging, keeps you coming back for more! I’m in my second year of subscribing..

Great

These courses are taught by the people that you wished you had had teaching you at school, university and in life. Unfortunately, people this good at conveying subject matter are rare in life. Each course is brilliantly taught, the information available and easy to understand sections and the software does not get in the way of learning. Treat yourself, who would not want to be a fabulous mixologist, design rooms that are inspiring to live in and cook in a way that puts a smile on your face and on others. Highly recommended.
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Download option not useable without internet connection.

i get errors anytime I try and watch downloaded videos offline telling me there was an error and to try later. As soon as I bring the internet connection back all is fine . Opened a support case and they told me you cannot watch the content offline , only when you have an internet connection. If that’s the case why is there a download option at all and why does it claim you can “download and watch from anywhere “ .
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Scott Lycett

I love Scott! All the way from Australia and could listen to him all day. Can’t wait to try some of these beautiful arrangements and put into practice what I have learnt.
Thank you so much. So have I found this site