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How To Rearrange & Hide Channels On Apple TV
A Guide To Customizing Your Apple TV Home Screen
When the Apple TV first came out way back in 2007 it had fewer than a dozen channels. Since the the number of channels–or “apps” as some people like to call them–have slowly crept up. Today the latest version of the Apple TV has almost 60 (depending what country you live in) channels and counting, with more coming every month.
That may seem great, but when you consider the fact that most people watch fewer than five or so channels all the extra channels means that there’s a lot of clutter on your Apple TV home screen. That in turn means you need to do a lot more clicking to navigate to the channel you want.
Thankfully Apple has thought of this and–in a rare move on the company’s part–allows you to customize the Apple TV interface and even hide the built-in channels that you don’t want to see.
Rearrange Apple TV Channels
Apple allows you to customize your Apple TV experience by rearranging the channels on your home screen. This allows you to place them in the order you want. For example, you can move your most-watched channels to the top of the screen. Do note however, that you can’t move the Movies, TV Shows, Music, iTunes Radio, or Computers channels.
To rearrange your Apple TV channels, perform the following steps:
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Using the Apple TV remote select the channel you want to move.
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With the channel selected press and hold the center black button on the remote. The channel will begin wobbling.
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Use the remotes circular D-ring to move the channel up, down, left, or right. As you do so all the other channels will shift.
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When you’ve moved the channel to the position you want press the center black button once more to set the channel in place.
Hide Apple TV Channels
If moving channels doesn’t do it for you and you really want to clean up your Apple TV home screen you can actually completely hide the channels you don’t want to see. Again, you can’t hide the Movies, TV Shows, Music, iTunes Radio, or Computers channels–but everything else is fair game. There are actually two ways to hide Apple TV channels.
To hide your Apple TV channels, perform the following steps (option 1):
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Using the Apple TV remote select the channel you want to hide.
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With the channel selected press and hold the center black button on the remote. The channel will begin wobbling.
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Press the Play/Pause button to call up a submenu. The submenu will only have two options: Hide This Item or Cancel.
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Press the center black button once to hide the channel and it will be removed from your home screen.
To hide your Apple TV channels, perform the following steps (option 2):
While the above steps are handy if you want to only hide one or two Apple TV channels, does so in that manner could take a long time if you want to hide twenty or thirty of them. That’s why Apple has created this second way of hiding Apple TV channels.
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Select the Settings app on the Apple TV home screen by navigating to its icon and pressing the black center button on the Apple TV remote.
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On the Settings screen select the “Main Menu” command.
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On the next screen you’ll see a list of every channel on your Apple TV. Select the channel title of the channel you want to hide and press the black center button on the Apple TV remote. The status of the channel will change from “Show” to “Hide”.
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Continue moving through all the channels in the list to hide the ones you want.
Restore Apple TV Channels
It’s worth noting that hiding a channel on the Apple TV isn’t like deleting an app on your iPhone. When you hide a channel you just remove it from view on your Apple TV home screen, however it’s still always there lurking below the surface and you can always quickly “unhide” it again so it appears back on your home screen.
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Select the Settings app on the Apple TV home screen by navigating to its icon and pressing the black center button on the Apple TV remote.
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On the Settings screen select the “Main Menu” command.
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On the next screen you’ll see a list of every channel on your Apple TV–the ones that are both shown and hidden on your home screen. Select the channel title of the channel you want to unhide and press the black center button on the Apple TV remote. The status of the channel will change from “Hide” to “Show”.
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Continue moving through all the channels in the list to unhide the ones you want.
Michael Grothaus
14:32, 27 Jul 2015