Beta - Channel Collections

@maddox How and where do we give you guys a hug?

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Is there any logic as to how the collections are ordered? I can't seem to reorder them, which would be a nice option.

Just realized you can switch the order by picking them in order through the settings.

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This is really fantastic. My wife, kids, and I can have different channel lists on all our devices now. That said, I do wish they could work alongside the old metadata based lists. The sports one was really useful in the evenings to see what is on and what I want to watch at any easy glance.

I agree. TNT is a prime example. NBA games come on TNT. But I don’t necessarily want to save that station as a sports network.

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This is fantastic and exactly what I'd been wishing for. I've already curated some collections, and am happy these centralized lists appear automatically on both of my AppleTV's. Any changes I make propagates to both immediately.

I also love how easy it is to reorder the channels in these lists via the Channels DVR Server web admin, just by clicking and dragging, which then immediately updates their order on the tvOS client's display as well. Very slick.

Those are the Channel Collections I've come up with so far. What collection ideas have y’all come up with?

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This is great too! I don't see this option in the latest TestFlight iOS app yet, but I do see it on the server, and I set it to Current Collection. In the iOS app, I now see it set to "current-collection" and it's grayed out (as expected.)

But it doesn't appear to be working, at least in the Quick Guide. With this setting, I'm only seeing one channel appear (the thumbnail of the channel I'm currently watching) when I swipe down to show the Quick Guide. So I've changed this back to the (local) Favorites, for now.

Ideally I'd like to have the option to choose a specific Channel Collection as our default these options to use. For example I created a "Favorites" Channel Collection on the server to replace my local favorites. I would like for that Collection to source the channels in Quick Guide and Channels Surfing, regardless of what other Channel Collection I might have started off in.

This feature is an absolute game-changer and it works brilliantly with all the custom channels (i.e. Pluto) many of us have added recently. A thousand thank yous to the Channels developer team! This is yet another home run!

No pun intended :wink:

I made a TV Classics collection too!

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Hmm sounds like a bug. I’ll check it in the morning.

It’s a little tricky but I’ll see how doable it is without it touching a lot of places in the codebase.

Great minds! :wink: So many Pluto channels to choose from, this collection is fun to browse.

Thanks.

Fingers crossed. And thanks again. This new feature made my day.

I made a happy discovery:

Names of Channel Collections can include emoji. Because, of course they can :star_struck:

:newspaper_roll: :popcorn: :performing_arts: :nerd_face: :football: :tv: :eye: :notes:

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This is fantastic! Can’t wait for android version. I have both iOS and android. I prefer and use android, the apple remote drives me absolutely crazy!

Maybe one day they develop feature so you can have collection like "Basketball", something like YTTV has for recording.

I have latest beta on iOS and FireTV Stick 4K and Channel Collections do not show up on any device, can't even see them in guide or on now on the web ui.

Do you have the latest prerelease of the server, too? (Also, Collections are Apple only for now; they won't appear in your Fire Stick.)

yes 2021.03.24.1847 and iOS 3.24.1555, is it in tvOS only?

Thanks for this great addition. I will not get to try it for a couple of days, but I think it will alleviate the struggles I've had with favorites.

That said, I think the inability to do the dynamic filtering will be a loss. I often pick the Movies filter and go through and pick movies to record, and the filters give you a different list of channels each time you do that. There is no realistic way that you could create a collection that would do this. Same applies to sports which can appear on almost any channel at times.

I look at collections as solving the Favorites problem that's been the biggest obstacle for our use, but I fear the loss of the filters could be a big loss.

Either way, I'm really happy to see this and can't wait to try it out.

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As for ideas this is my "History" collection

I must be doing something wrong. Running latest beta 1847. My system is server Raspberry Pi (up to date), Windows Web Server with Firefox and Fire Stick. When I click Live TV>Channel Collections a screen pops up unlike the picture which shows all the items that are available in the Fire TV ie. All, Favorites etc. Instead it shows ' Channel Collections Curate your own groups of channels' which I'm able to do. Right now for testing I just have a group of 2 channels labled OTA. I then go to clients and select Server Side, check then click Add Settings. Go to right side and select OTA from **Server Side Only > Channel Collections. Quit screen back main server screen Head back upstairs and turn on TV and launch Channels. No change, guide and on now still the same, any ideas on what I am doing wrong? Even restarted Fire Stick,

The very first sentence of this thread says that it’s only for apple clients.