While flipping between college football games today, I decided to make a Channel Collection using the Automatic Channels feature. It worked, of course! But while using it I did have an idea to make it a little better that I think could be useful in other situations as well. It's probably not a quick fix kinda thing though, but more of something to maybe add down the road if it seems worthwhile.
The problems I see that I think can be fixed are the Automatic Channels having duplicate channels from multiple sources, duplicate channels when there is an east and west feed, not being able to control the order the channels are displayed in, and not being able to exclude specific channels. (I know you can exclude sources but I need both sources for my use case.)
So right now, as an example, my college football Automatic Channels came back looking like this:
ABC (ota)
CBS (ota)
FOX (ota)
ABC (tve)
CBS (tve)
FOX (tve)
TRU East
TRU West
ESPN
ESPN2
SEC
CBSSN
FS1
I think these issues can be fixed by allowing us to make custom Automatic Channels "templates" for our Channel Collections. I'd still setup my Automatic Channels keywords and settings as usual. But then I would choose which channels on which sources I want Automatic Channels to search in, and put them in the order I want Automatic Channels to display them in when it finds things.
So in my case, I would make a template including the OTA and TVE channels I want, leave out the duplicate TVE channels, choose whether to use the east or west feeds, leave out channels I don't want included even if they have matching content (like CBSSN), then reorder things how I want to see them. Now my Automatic Channel results look like this:
ABC (ota)
CBS (ota)
FOX (ota)
ESPN
ESPN2
FS1
SEC
TRU East
This isn't something you would need every time you use Automatic Channels in a Channel Collection. And the current way works great and is better than what I was doing before! But I think allowing us to make templates for Automatic Channels to use would make the feature even better.