Any way to “surf” like legacy cable tv?

[theanimala]

It appears as though I am a dinosaur, still using cable (FIOS) on my Sony OLED. I recently purchased an AppleTV 128GB and love the streaming apps. I was considering getting rid of FIOS and using YouTube TV instead. Is there any way to just surf channels like what I can do in FIOS?

Let’s say I’m watching channel 4, I know I can just press the channel up button 1 time to get to channel 5. Seems with the ATV and YTTV I have to go to the channel guide, then click down to 5, then press enter. Ok, no big deal. But then when I’m want to go back to channel 4 I have to do that again. When watching live TV I am often jumping around to avoid commercials.

Is there any way to watch TV like I am used to? Streaming from apps is great, but when I don’t know what I want to watch I find my legacy FIOS much easier to navigate. Any way I can make this work for an old timer like myself?

 

[OverTheHill]

If you have YouTube TV, it has a linear guide. You can go into the profile and set up your channels any way that you like. We had it for a year and found that multiple apps work for us, but YouTubeTV is just like cable or satellite. No channel numbers though. No channel up and down either. Have to go back to the guide. We stacked the locals at the top of the guide. Added news next, sports after, movie channels after that then all of the multichannel stuff free that. It was convenient. No voice recognition though…. That might have kept us. Being able to say something like “CBS” and have it switch to CBS would have been nice.

 

[ger19]

There’s also a function to go back to the last channel so that if you’re watching two channels, you can switch back and forth between them without having to go back to the guide. For me, I press and hold the select button on my remote.

Thanks for the info about stacking the guide. I’ll be putting my main channels in a group which will help a lot.

 

[orbital~debris]

Pluto TV for tvOS provides a loosely similar experience to an EPG-based system (like Sky in the UK), if that's any help.

 

[BeerDrinkerDan]

I wish I could with Hulu. It's annoying to bring up the guide every time I want to skip through sports across a few channels.

-bdd

 

[jetsam]

It appears as though I am a dinosaur, still using cable (FIOS) on my Sony OLED. I recently purchased an AppleTV 128GB and love the streaming apps. I was considering getting rid of FIOS and using YouTube TV instead. Is there any way to just surf channels like what I can do in FIOS?

Let’s say I’m watching channel 4, I know I can just press the channel up button 1 time to get to channel 5. Seems with the ATV and YTTV I have to go to the channel guide, then click down to 5, then press enter. Ok, no big deal. But then when I’m want to go back to channel 4 I have to do that again. When watching live TV I am often jumping around to avoid commercials.

Is there any way to watch TV like I am used to? Streaming from apps is great, but when I don’t know what I want to watch I find my legacy FIOS much easier to navigate. Any way I can make this work for an old timer like myself?

I was a long time cable TV subscriber (going back to 1986!) but I finally got sick of Comcast's prices. I dropped cable TV, switching to just Comcast 1.1 Gbps internet ($70 total monthly price) and YouTube TV ($84/month total price, but there are frequent deals - I'm getting $10 off/month for six months). Overall, I'm saving $100 or more a month - worth a little inconvenience!

Edit: I see YouTube TV is offering 10 days free before they charge you. You might try it before you cancel FiOS, to see if you're good with it.