Request: On Now UI change; "Record" to "Details"

When viewing the On Now section, pressing Select or OK on the remote will immediately change to that channel. However, if one wants to see the details about the program in the On Now section, this doesn't appear to be possible.

If you press Menu, Info, or long-press Select/OK, you are presented with a menu:

  • Record
  • Move (if on the Favorites tab)
  • Favorite
  • Hide

None of those options seem to offer the user the ability to view a description of the program, to view its start/end time, or to see which tags (New, HD, etc.) apply to the program.

While trying to quickly set something to record yesterday, I selected Record from this menu for the first time, expecting the DVR to immediately start recording, while leaving the UI on the On Now screen. Imagine my surprise when the Details dialog appeared, duplicating the same functionality I would normally have to navigate to the Guide to see (after pressing the Menu of Info key on my remote).

This request is to rename the Record entry in this menu to Details (or similar—nomenclature isn't terribly important), as it is misleading and inhibits discoverability. In fact, yesterday was the first time in nearly 2 years of using Channels that I discovered that this option would display the Details dialog instead of instantly starting a recording in the background!

(Also, I don't know if this applies to the tvOS client, as I do not own an AppleTV. However, on iOS/iPadOS this is moot since selecting an item from On Now on those devices always displays the Details dialog.)

This is a good point. Originally, it was put there because we needed a way to let people Record, because of the reasons you listed out. I wanted to make it clear that you could record, so we named it that. But we also wanted to let you use all the recording facilities like recording with options, so we obviously just show you the modal and the existing UI flow to do it.

But I too have wanted to see details on something and saw the Record button and paused, heh.

I guess if we hav Details, then as someone that's used the app enough, you should expect that modal to pop up that you're used to seeing EVERYWHERE. So you'd just know that the record button would be available in there. Is that a fair assumption?

I think that's fair. Also, the modal dialog is context sensitive already:

  • In-progress live programs have:
    • Watch
    • Record
    • Record With Options
    • Create/Manage Pass
  • Future live programs have:
    • Record
    • Record With Options
    • Create/Manage Pass
  • Recorded episodes have:
    • Watch
    • Mark Watched/Unwatched
    • More Episodes (if opened from the On Now list)
    • Delete

The outlier is with Movies. However, that's a non-issue going forward, as the 3.x series on Android have migrated from the old full-screen view for movies to the same modal used for all other detail views.

(I stated to write more about the modal dialog here, but I realized it was starting to get quite long and a bit disconnected from this topic, so I'm splitting it into a second post.)

Thanks for looking at this Jon @maddox.

This was unintentional.

Is it a change that will remain going forward? The previous full-screen view for movies is quite lacking:

  • It doesn't show from which channel it was recorded.
  • It only displays at most 3 actors.
  • It makes poor use of the screen real estate.
  • And as a continuation of the above, if the movie's full description is too long, it is truncated. This seems quite odd, as there is ample space left on the screen to display the full text, but its maximum size seems to allow for text to only occupy the upper half of the screen.

Also, the layout/visual style of that particular view seems quite different from the rest of the application. It almost seems as if the rest of the application evolved into a more uniform UI/UX, but the movie detail screen was forgotten.