Feeds and channels on Apple TV: websites, podcasts and YouTube

If you chose “Use on Its Own” when you first started channelBar TV, you set up channels and feeds right on your Apple TV. If your Apple TV is paired with an iPhone or Mac, your channels come from there, and that’s where you add feeds too. The video on getting started with Apple TV shows that first choice.

The plus: “Add Feed”

New feeds come in through the plus at the top right, right next to the gear. One click opens “Add Feed”. At the top, under “Channel”, you pick the channel the new feed goes into; your first channel is preselected. With “New Channel”, you create one on the spot: enter a name, choose “Create Channel”, and it’s selected.

Below is the search field, and it takes anything: a web address, a YouTube name or a search word. “Done” takes you back to the mosaic.

A website

Know a website? Enter its address, 9to5mac.com in the video; you can leave out “https://”. If the address is a feed itself, channelBar takes it directly; otherwise it finds the feeds the site points to. One click on the result, and the feed is in the channel. The checkmark tells you so. Click it again, and channelBar removes the feed after a quick check.

A search word

Or search for a word. First pick the right channel at the top, Podcasts in the video, then enter a word, say, “history”, and send off the search. channelBar searches several places at once: its starter feeds for news and videos whose name contains the word, Apple Podcasts for podcasts and, once you’ve allowed YouTube, YouTube for a channel of that name.

The symbol on the left shows each result’s type. News and videos are at the top, with podcasts below. Above the results, you filter by type: with “Podcasts”, only podcasts remain. One click on one, and it’s in the channel too. Each new search starts again with “All”.

A YouTube channel

For a YouTube channel, pick the Videos channel at the top. The search field gets the channel’s name with the at sign in front, just as it appears on its YouTube page; the page’s address works too. The first time, channelBar asks whether it may connect to YouTube. “Allow” lets it go ahead, and channelBar remembers that.

Click the result, and channelBar asks which YouTube content you want to see: “All Content”, “No Shorts” or “Only Shorts”. In the video, it’s “No Shorts”.

“Channels and Feeds” in Settings

The gear takes you to Settings, then “Channels and Feeds”. Here you see every channel with its number of feeds. Below, “New Channel” creates a channel, and “Add starter feeds” starts the guided setup again: it suggests feeds that match your language and interests.

Click a channel to open it. “Add Feed” searches just like the plus, but straight for this channel. Below are its feeds, with a new one at the end. The minus removes a feed after a quick check, and channelBar deletes its messages along with it. “Delete Channel” removes the whole channel with all its feeds and messages, after a check as well.

How often your Apple TV checks

One page back, under “Fetching”, is the “Polling Interval”. It sets how often the Apple TV checks for new entries, from 5 minutes to 24 hours; by default, it’s 15 minutes. If a feed itself asks for longer gaps, channelBar sticks to them. If your Apple TV is paired, you find the interval in Settings under “Feeds”.

Back in the mosaic, 9to5Mac is already at the top of News in the video, because channelBar fetches a new feed right away. How to decide what each column shows is explained in the video on the mosaic.