BETA: Craft your own experience with Personal Sections on tvOS and iOS

Living up to the feature's name, I created a Personal Section for a family member with very specific taste. It's a one-stop-shop for them to be able to quickly choose what to watch:

1 - Recently Added Movies
2 - Button shortcuts to various other parts of the app (Up Next, Collections, Playlists)
3 - Game Shows - On Now
4 - Martial Arts (boxing, wrestling, MMA, etc.) - On Now
5 - Unwatched Documentaries in library
6 - 4K movies in library
7 - Top Rated movies in library
8 - Recently Updated Shows

1 Like

As of the latest TestFlight beta, Personal Sections are now available for Start Up, Remote Shortcuts, and launchable via the Channels API and Deep Links.

They are not yet available from Siri Shortcut actions, but they will come later.

Note: personal Sections will be prioritized over native sections. So if you have a Personal Section with the same name as a native section, I.e. Movies, your Personal Section will be used.

1 Like

Would be really great if we could have a one touch system from the personal sections. Meaning, every time I select a channel that’s currently playing from “channel collections”, it pulls up the submenu of “watch now, record, etc”. Would be great if we could just click the thumbnail and jump straight into the channel like when we select something from guide.

I have a home automation setup using Keyboard Maestro using the remote trigger feature. This allows me to fire off macros from any browser by entering a specific url. You can also use a curl command in terminal.

When I setup a URL button in a personal section url row to send this url it not seem to go out to the WAN. Is this a limitation in the URL button that it can only launch apps on the ATV?

I suspect the answer is no but I just wanted to check in case Channels can send a curl within the app. Maybe this limitation is related to why Apple does have a browser for AppleTV (other than the fact it would be a terrible user experience).

Yes.

As tvOS does not have a browser, the only URLs it will ”open” are deep links or universal links to other apps.

When this feature makes it to iOS, it will open the links with the default system browser.

So even then, it won’t do what you want.

The URLs for buttons are links, they’re not just http requests that are made in the background.

Some recent changes in the latest pre-release server should help Personal Sections a bit. These changes with Labels should help your Smart Rules work better for Episodes and Videos

Label Propagation

Labels from TV Shows and Video Groups will propagate to their newly added episodes and videos. So, if your Show has a dads-shows label, all newly added episodes will get the dads-shows label.

Note: This is not retroactive, and this does not add the labels to all the episodes when you add the label to the show. Label propagation only happens at the moment items are added to the library (recorded or imported).

Label management now available for the batch editor for Episodes and Videos

You can now select multiple items, open the batch metadata editor, and manage the labels on these items all at once.

This should give you the tools you need to set labels for older items, or just faster in general.

1 Like

As of the latest pre-release server and TestFlight beta of tvOS, Up Next is now available for Personal Sections.

1 Like

Select the item with the Play button to play it back immediatly. (This is a normal gesture across all of Channels).

1 Like

Reminder that with the latest stable release of the server, you’ll have lost access to editing your Personal Sections, since they are not public yet.

Update to the latest pre-release to get back on the pre-release again.

Up Next section sometimes is not updating after i delete something or watch an episode, and it does not refresh to show the next episode. Have to go to a different page, or close open the app again and it refreshes.

Submitted diags from app, just know, after I deleted OPL First Shift from Up Next in personal section, and it still shows, until i say, open the Guide, then go back to my Personal Section

Edit. Did it again when i watched, then deleted a Episode of Mythbusters. Sent diags again
App. Beta 7.17.1457

Ive had this a lot more lately as well. I have to go off of the uo next screen and then back to up next to get it to refresh.

Same issue. Personal section showing channel collections with progress turned on dont update. Have to close app to get them to refresh with new thumbnails and new shows.

@maddox i cant seem to find my personal section in the startup config, am i missing something?

It didn’t get added there yet. We’ll get to it.

They’re in the local settings on the client though.

This is amazing! I am trying to open to a specific YouTube page and it's not opening to that specific YouTube channel. Any ideas?

What's the format of your URL?

youtube://https://www.youtube.com/tnawrestling

That's not a video. That's one YouTube channel's page, with many videos.

Try this example instead:

youtube://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlatSezAHwQ

I am trying to just do the main channel page because I am subscribed to a membership thing and would like to go there every week when they release a new video because there is not a way to get that link automatically updated for the new episode.

I hear ya. Hopefully support for something like can be added too some day.

2 Likes