This is less a feature request than an attempt at clarification.
Given the list of available channels (let's say some broadcast, some from TVE, some from m3u) for each channel one can mark the channel as
Favorite (heart)
"Blocked" (stop sign) or
Neutral.
These control what is displayed in various places but the precise details are not clear to me. In particular consider the following issues:
- where exactly do these (Favorite vs Blocked vs Neutral) affect what is displayed?
What seems to be the case is that - "Blocked" hides a channel even from All Channels. The only way to see a "blocked" channel is to go to the full channel list (either app settings or web browser) and unblock it.
- Favorite defines whether a channel appears or not in a Favorites list of Channels. (ie it defines an easy way to create one particular channel list, which may be good enough for most people).
That's all great, but consider the following questions:
- does Favorites affect the display of what is seen in any other contexts
- does "Blocked" affect the display of what is seen in any other contexts, or what is found via searches and Smart Passes.
For example,
- do Favorites modify the order in which things are displayed in the various On Later displays? (As far as I can tell, no, but I'm not sure what determines that ordering.)
And if I "block" a channel, to what extent does that hide it?
- Do items from that channel populate the various On Later views (On Today, Upcoming Movies, etc). As far as I can tell, yes.
- Do items from blocked channels appear in a search, or matching a Smart Pass? As far as I can tell, yes, but I am not sure whether this is by design, or simply by hysteresis (ie the channel guide is filtered by blocked channels when the guide is downloaded, so blocking a channel and testing how things play out has no effect until the next guide download...)
In terms of my opinions, the way this should work is something like
- Favorites should have some weight in the order of how things are displayed. Maybe not total weight, but should count for something.
- Blocked channels should not show up anywhere that content can be "overwhelming", so not in channel lineups and not in On Later views. BUT if I ask for something specific (by Search or by a Smart Pass) I do want it to show up if it's available anywhere, even on a blocked channel.
If this is not the actual design, please think about what the actual design should be. On the one hand, with 1000+ channels available, one wants to be very aggressive in hiding channels that usually do not hold anything of interest (eg when looking at Upcoming Movies); On the other hand, one does want to be able to extract value from all those channels under conditions of a targeted search or Smart Pass, looking for some obscure movie that may only be on a foreign channel or something equally specialized.