Live TV Categories

When you add a TV tuner to Plex, you can end up with 2,000 channels. Since most devices only have an up/down scroll, you can’t just select to go 1800 section where premium movie channels are. It helps that there is a favorites list, but even this can get overloaded with hundreds of favorite channels.

It would be nice if we could have a categories filter for LiveTV. I could organize MTV and Investigation Discovery and such into a “Reality” tab and HBO and Cinemax into a “Cable Movies” tab. I subscribe to the extra sports packages from my cable provider and end up with like a thousand sports channels too.

If not a categories system, could you at least allow a box to enter a channel number? Like the older folks in my home were used to the old cable box and knew to type in “1800” to get to the channels they wanted. If we can’t put them into categories, at least allow us to memorize the channel numbers and enter them into a box somewhere to skip the scanning for 20 minutes.

PS: Google Bard is totally of the mind that this already exists. I asked it about it and Bard gave me instructions to features that do not exist. If Google Bard thinks it exists, then it should totally exist.

For at least the Apple TV 4K, Android TV, and web clients, this feature does exist, in a pre-defined fashion. For example, here are what the categories look like in the web client:

There are additional categories available by scrolling to the right. You can’t create user-defined categories, but there are already existing reality, sports, movies, et al…

Do you not have these available in your clients? The only reason I could think of they may not be present (at least for the clients I listed) is if you’re using an XMLTV guide source. Those don’t contribute to the categories listing (but are mainly used in IPTV environments and countries where Plex can’t supply guide data).

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