A post was split to a new topic: Fire TV beta has no icon
I don’t think this is happening for me, if I understand correctly. When I go into the show, the oldest episode is focused in the beta version:
Whereas in the release version where I have the show set to newest first, it does what I expect:
This is really fundamentally different for news programs (playing newest first makes sense) versus serialized dramas, etc. (playing oldest first makes sense). If anything it’d be better to have the option more visible, rather than less visible/removed.
Great feedback. News programs were immediately thought about with this change.
It’s real tricky to make this work for both full season shows and news and we’re super aware of it.
So it’s gonna be a delicate balance.
I think finally making the option for setting watch order in the client (so it’s accessible) AND using it for sort is going to be the key to the success of this change.
Sorting full seasons backwards feels terrible with this new view. But news should be sorted frontwards. So, clearly having a global direction is never going to solve all cases.
This way you can have regular episodic shows ordered by season, and your news shows showing last recorded first.
1 Like
Would extending the existing setting under Recordings > Shows > All > Series > 
> Show Settings work? Presently the Watch Oldest/Newest First directs the Up Next order; an additional setting for sorting in the clients would make sense here. Or, use the same setting—Oldest/Newest—for both Up Next and sorting.
Yep, that’s what I was referring to.
Hey everyone, I'm back!
Ok I've put this new view through another iteration. I'm going to list all of the things that changed and how I think it can give us a better balance.
- No more autofocusing the next watchable episode. It was just disorienting.
- News and sports no longer have a seasons filter bar. It's hidden for these types of recordings.
- Any show that only has a single season in the season bar, won't focus the season bar. Focus skips right past it.
- The global sorting of episodes setting is back, but it's now defaulted to Oldest first, to better support larger libraries with shows with lots of seasons.
- We can now, after years, set the show options IN the app. This means setting the "Watch Order", "Ignore in Up Next", and "Ignore Commercials" options that were only available in the web admin.
- Now that we can set "Watch Order" easier, this option is finally respected in the UI for things like sorting and even better, Auto Play. Now, when your talk show is set to Newest for watch order, you can start watching the newest talk show and it will auto play the previous one.
So, out of the box, Channels will sort your shows in seasonal and episodic order. You have 2 options to adjust the order for your shows.
- Set the watch order for your show to newest, and it will reverse the order to respect that. This is of course great for News and Sports and we eventually plan on making this the default for those types of shows in the future.
- Set the order for all your shows with the global setting.
If your show is set to Newest for watch order, it will always be ordered that way. Anything else will be sorted based on the global setting.
So give this new iteration a try.
PS: I also through in some new options for Auto Play to let you include or exclude watched episodes. They're similar to the Shuffle settings.
2 Likes
Nice to be able to adjust this in the client!
On an iPhone XS the settings get cut off pretty aggressively though, and the contrast (dark mode enabled) is a bit low.
I like seasons being hidden but sometimes they aren’t?
Finally I’m seeing (null) display with one show. Would prefer this just be replaced by the date.
Thanks, I hadn't even LOOKED at it on iOS yet 
The Episode Sorting is wonderful. Thanks guys. No more scrolling to the right to pick the earliest episode.
Just in case it’s not clear. This work is in preparation for local TV imports, which just went into alpha:
1 Like
Hey everyone, I'm back....again!
A new beta is on it's way up to TestFlight. This is pretty much the final design and will shipped out soon. Thanks so much for the help and feedback on this!
- Improved: Episodes are defaulted to order by newest again
- Improved: New design for Show Options that work well in iOS as well
Rechecking my earlier issues…
The presentation of Show Options looks better on iOS but:
- The name of the show is missing from the display now
- Nothing happens when I tap on any of the options
Seasons gone in Today now, but the sort order is strange — 218, 217, 219, 220?
The “null”s are gone in Amanpour and Company, which is good. However, the date shows up twice — perhaps you could hide the 2nd one (small text) if there’s no other episode title available?
Updated screenshots:
I screwed this up, it's fixed in the next beta rolling out now. Sort order is also fixed for the Today show. It was an artifact of the fact that Saturday airings are set to Season 0, so when the episodes were sorted into seasons (even though news doesn't present that anymore), they were ordered wrong. News and sports not longer get sorted into sections and THEN flattened, they're not sorted by season at all now. So order should be good now.
See, this stuff aint easy!
3 Likes
All good now 
Thanks!
1 Like
Is it so hard to get white text? Bad enough we deal with purple for everything else under the sun. Why is it so hard to get white text? It's so much more readable. I'm fine limiting my nagging about ditching purple, but for the life of me I don't understand why you make so much purple text on purple background. It's like graphic design 101. Even your text on this website is in white with purple backgrounds in many places. So you kinda get it, but not really.
We'll be doing a pass on typography in the app. It's a large project and we're just coming off of insanely large updates over the last few weeks.
We've heard your request and criticism, consider this acknowledgement of it.
1 Like
OK this is weird. There appears to be a bug in the latest production build of Channels DVR on TVOS where clicking on a specific season in the show view doesn't do anything. In the latest Beta on TVOS, this works fine and clicking on a season scrolls the episode list to the first episode in that season.
Weird, I’m not seeing this.
Could it be that you just don’t have that many episodes? In that case it won’t really scroll.
Nope it can't be that since I tried the same show on the production app and the beta app. The same happens on all other shows. Here's a video showing this behaviour:
https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/00dPuKNJT4rp77iSYGRJfkU3A#Channels_Beta
Latest production app and latest TestFlight beta installed.