Virtual Channel Visibility

How is this determined? I have a few VC (Craig of the Creek, Bluey and Spider Man). Craig of the Creek and Bluey show up in the kids section, Spider-Man does not (but this might be cartoon vs movies dependent). All of the Spider-Man content (a mix of cartoons and movies) is designated as Kids visibility (although the ratings might not indicate that's appropriate). The others would naturally appear there.

Are there any plans to designate a VC's visibility?

There’s no mechanism in guides to filter things by visibility, so it doesn’t make much sense.

Consider using Channel Collections to make your own group of channels.

Re-reading your question, I see now that you mean the content inside it.

Seeing that you’re 100% responsible for building the channel, I’m not sure what this can really do. If you don’t want something in the channel, don’t put it there.

Maybe I need more information on what your concern is?

Ideally, I'd like the virtual channel to show in the Kids section on the guide data (so the kids can always just go there for content). The Spider Man movies (all local content) obviously are rated PG or PG-13, so that's probably why. However, I do have them all assigned to Kids visibility in my Library in a collection.

However this isn't a big deal, and I imagine the filters on the guide data and Visibility of local content don't mix and match well.

Ahh I see, you're hoping the built in kids filter would pull in the virtual channels. This should probably work but the airings currently playing would have to match the filter rules, which is genre being children. Visibility settings of movies/shows have no bearing on how these filters work.

Again, if you want them to show in Kids, I'd highly suggest just start using Channel Collections. You'll be able to build your own collections of channels.

I do have a Spider-Man collection. :blush: It's actually the entirety of the Spider-Man VC. The kids like the don't-have-to-pick part of virtual channels, but this is a very first world problem. I can create a Channel Collection. Thanks!

I would like to request this as well. It would be great to be able to assign a genre when creating a virtual channel, so it will show up in the kid's guide.

I think Virtual Channels and Channel Collections can be tied together, no ....

The default sections in the guides don’t show channels by genre. They show channels based on the genre of the program that is currently playing.

Channels do not have genre information.

The reason it came up for me was because I made a virtual channel with all of the kids movies, but when I went to the client that is set to kids mode, the channel did not appear in the guide. After changing the visibility of the movies that were included to be in both the library and in the kids the channel showed up in the guide. On a side note is there a faster way to change visibility for a group versus clicking on each movie to edit it?

The problem is probably the genres applied to the movies from TMDB. They probably don’t match what comes from Gracenote, which is what live TV uses. Because of that, we didn’t need to worry about TMDB genres. But now it makes sense.

I’ll check it out and we can probably get it worked out. Though I’m not sure TMDB data is as vigilant at tagging kids stuff as TMDB is, so it might not be so consistent.

We don’t want to make the genres so broad that non kids stuff ends up showing.

This is fair. But if a parent has approved it, at a rather high level by going into the web admin and marking it kids approved, that seems like it should take precedence.

I have and 8, 6 and 4 year old. I’ve recently put Channels on the older two’s iPads, Kids mode. They can access things I’ve manually approved and put in Kids aka Spider Man movies in our Library. But if they can directly spin it up, and they like the randomness of a virtual channeI, which tbh is so great because then they don’t argue about what of X they get to watch, or if they just want to not have to decide if they know WHAT they want but not the details….I don’t see why that should be locked out. They can already do it. They just don’t get the surprise.

I understand Channel Collections can do this, but Kids is such a nice category for Kids (especially with its own setting of Kids Only mode).

I'm not saying it can't be. I'm explaining why it's not working right now.

Virtual Channel Bliss. Thanks for adding it regardless!

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OK, the latest TestFlight beta changes 2 things:

  1. The kids filter now adds the Family genre to it's list of genres it uses to suss out airings for kids. This covers a lot of movies indexed via TMDB (your local content imports).
  2. The kids filter now also takes in consideration Library Visibility. So any airing that is set to Kids or Both, will show up in the Kids filter in the guides.
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