Ok, I’m certainly not saying you should never change things! Perhaps it would be more useful if I detailed how I use Channels, and why it’s less convenient now, and you can take that as feedback to consider when you’re thinking about future changes.
In the client apps (Apple TV, iPad, iPhone), I almost exclusively do two things:
-
Look at the guide at my Favorite channels (all OTA) to see what’s on tonight, sometimes watch something live, and possibly record something. I say “possibly” there, as I almost always set up recordings from the web interface rather than the clients, but I do like to look at the guide.
-
From the Home Screen, watch my recordings.
Occasionally I go to the settings or the scheduled recordings or whatnot, but that’s like 1% of my usage; 99% is the two items I mentioned.
My frustration with the new layout is to switch between the Guide, and the Home Screen where my recordings are, now takes two taps instead of one. (first world problem i realize - haha!).
For the sake of discussion, here are some potential ideas that come to mind, keeping in mind the constraints you mentioned:
A) Perhaps have a way to have the left slide-out panel be a “pane” that can stay open on iPad. Sort of like the side bar in the Mail app - you can keep it open all the time if you want, or hide it and bring it back as you need it.
B) Maybe, probably only on iPad, have a way to have icons for specific sections pinned just to the right of the hamburger button. So a couple of favorite pages I could have buttons pinned up there at the top of the screen on the left. I can’t think of specific prior art from other apps for this, but it came to mind.
C) If there was a way to add a “Guide” block to a personal section, I think I could build a page that would do everything I usually need, and just set that as my default. For reference, my “Favorite” channels only number about 7 or 8 channels, so it wouldn’t be unwieldy as a block on a section, although horizontal scrolling would probably be odd there. I haven’t played with the sections much (didn’t know about them until today!), so this might not make a lot of sense, but I wanted to at least mention it.
Anyway, hopefully this at least explains how I personally use it, and why I find the new design a bit inconvenient. Thanks for listening! 
