Sure, I’d seen that, thanks. My comment wasn’t in any way a complaint. I figured you’d put this in beta because you wanted feedback. My feedback was that rather than have to figure out a separate strategy to do this you could just use the setting already present in ios and that would come with the advantage of working in the same way this feature works in every other app on my phone. I totally realise this is beta and not everything will be there from day one. Just some feedback you can take or leave as you develop the feature.
Which setting are you referring to?
The mobile data setting isn't really suitable for downloads. First off it defaults to On. So with the default behavior, people would just download things on cellular and eat up their data? And if they didn't want that, they would need to know to go into the iOS settings, and also disable data so then the entire app doesn't work away from home?
Most video apps have their own setting to allow downloads over cellular, and it usually defaults to off.
Settings > Cellular > Channels app
Also, none of that matters. We're limiting ON PURPOSE. We want to make sure the feature doesn't leak in a way to download multiple gigs on someone's data plan.
We know exactly what we're doing and we're doing it on purpose. The ability to download over cellular will be available when the feature is released, it is not released, it is in beta and available early.
When the feature is released, it will work over cellular. Probably before it's released. For now it does not. It'll be fine.
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That’s a good point. I figured the risk of eating up data is already there when you stream video so not a new problem with downloads. But as you say, you’re right it doesn’t make sense to turn off mobile guide access etc just to avoid hefty mobile data use from downloads
I’m sorry I thought you wanted feedback from your users but I stand corrected. I’ll leave you to it.
Not necessarily though as downloads can consume significantly more bandwidth than a few minutes of streaming here and there. Especially when testing. Which can incur serious cellular charges for some folks if they're not paying full attention. I appreciate the care and caution the devs are putting into this. It's complicated, and it's important, but I'm confident they know what they're doing.
FWIW I've been testing this feature out this week, and it's been working great for me! Nothing else to report, it's just... working fine. 
Reading through this thread I'm struggling to understand what you were trying to accomplish. From the start we all said it would be a thing that is coming. As the people who implemented all of this, we have a lot of insight into how to do what needs to be done and the best way to have the best experience for our users. Building and maintaining this platform is a lot harder than it looks. There are a lot of little implications that aren't always obvious to the casual observer.
We are always interested in feedback in how people use and would like to use our product. It helps us inform the decisions we make. Feedback on what APIs to use to implement features tends to be less helpful because no one can understand all of the competing issues we face without having experience with all of the code we have created to make the app.
When developing features we're always going to prioritize moving slowly and carefully over potentially costing our beta users hundreds of dollars in data overages.
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Any plans to allow downloading at the Show level?
i.e. Download all episodes of a show.
Yep. We would like to have a "download all" and/or "download unwatched" button for shows.
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Or…
Always automagically download new episodes of a particular show.
As mentioned before, this is of course planned but most likely not the first iteration of Downloads.
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Still seeing the discrepancy in storage used on my iPad.
This is after downloading a bunch of episodes, then deleting them.
Math seems off if the 26.84GB used by Channels Beta is included in the 13.9GB total used.
Each time a new Beta version is loaded, the Channels Beta app usage resets to normal.
This comes out just as I finally have unlimited data haha anyways great work getting this process going. I will wait patiently for it to come to my Pixel 6 Pro although I will be testing it out on my iPad Pro soon
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@billyjoe If you could update to the latest TestFlight beta and submit diagnostics again, I would be interested to see the results. I've added more disk space metrics to see if I can identify what's going on here.
If anyone else has run into failed downloads due to disk space issues even though it appears there is sufficient free space, I would also appreciate diagnostics from you on the latest build.
Having issues recently with not able to get back to the non download pages. I’m in a hotel on a public Wi-Fi. With the non-beta, I get the normal screens to watch live or recorded shows but with the beta, it acts like I don’t have internet access. I have the latest beta. I have tried restarting the app but still doesn’t fix it.
Can you send diagnostics from the app and take a screenshot of what you see?
That would show if you:
- have downloads
- are not connected to your server
So it looks like you weren't ALREADY connected to your server. Go to Settings and connect to your Channels DVR Server with the big button.
That worked. I was expecting it to give me the prompt to connect to the remote server automatically like the non-beta. You may want it to be more like the non-beta.