Tuner in Use

I get the message “Tuner in Use” a lot on my ATV4 and now on my iPad. It’s starting to bug me. What is the root cause of this? For me it seems the trigger on the ATV is when I turn off my television without first tapping out of Channels to the ATV home menu. Sometimes I cannot do that as I fall asleep with the TV on a timer or if my power in my home flickers or goes out. For the ATV Channels app to work again, I have to restart the ATV. Not a problem to do that but I do not fancy my Apple product behaving like a Windows machine. Looking forward to the advise. Thank you.

Your tuners are in use, either streaming to another device or recording to the DVR.

This is a known limitation of tvOS. If you turn off the tv without stopping the Channels stream, it will keep streaming and keep your tuner busy.

I’m guessing it will stop streaming when the ATV goes to sleep?

It will, because the app will be told it’s being shut down, and then Channels will stop playback and release the tuner.

The issue is that tvOS does nothing to notify third party apps that the TV has turned off. Most likely because there’s no good universal way to even detect this on TVs. So, according to Channels, it’s still being watched.

Be sure to always stop playback before turning off your TV to preserve a tuner.