Since yours is an extreme case (800 movies purchased & controlled by "strangers" in the cloud), I'll offer you what is- IMO-the best solution to mostly abandon the Apple TV app and keep building your collection with actually owned, not lifetime* leased media.
Step 1: Get Big Storage for the 800 videos. That's probably one big hard drive. With 20TB hard drives available for as little as < $300 as I write this, taking possession of your library from strangers in the cloud is easy and cheap.
Step 2: Download the 800 from the cloud to your new local storage.
Step 3: Refer back to post #64 and do what is described there. This will index your 800 in the TV app on Mac (or iTunes on old macOS Mac or PCs) while leaving the library on the drive purchased in Step 1.
Step 4: Use the Orange Computers app instead of the AppleTV app on AppleTV to enjoy your movies. No more ads, no more services pitches, no more teasers to content you would have to buy/rent/subscribe for access, etc. Just enjoy.
Among many other things, possessing your content means
controlling your content. Continuing to trust a stranger in the cloud to caretake your content would be not very far from trusting a stranger with your bank savings. At any time, anything can happen when someone else controls your stuff. Right now, you are a prime victim in waiting of the mysterious "one of my movies is now missing from my collection" scenarios (which is usually a case of the studios stripping that movie). Step 1 puts you in charge of your stuff. Download your 800 and nobody can rip any of them away. Backup your 800 and a drive failure won't make you lose them either. The whole "cloud" thing facilitates injecting strangers between consumers and their digital stuff. It's easy to imagine all kinds of negative scenarios about that.
Wishlist still exists- just not in the AppleTV app. Access your wishlist on your Mac in the Music app: scroll to footer items to find My Wish List, then click "movies" or "tv show" tabs.
View attachment 2326343
You will likely find that it's also
easier to browse individual movies and make any future purchases there too. If you do make more purchases, download them to the Step 1 hard drive and enjoy them on the Computers app on AppleTV.
Since you use your wish list for bargain hunts, refer back to post #13 for a 2 birds with 1 stone solution. The used disc market will very often cost less than the new digital copy of about anything, so you can almost always find a better buy that way vs. waiting & hoping for special sales. Buying a disc means you will actually own the video instead of lifetime* lease, with all of the benefits of owning something (such as easily loaning it to someone else or even selling it to someone else).
Your Silicon Mac has all this incredible power "we" always sling to each other around here, so use that power to rip a digital copy from the disc so you can add it to the Step 1 library and enjoy it just like you do from Apple purchased content. Bonus: In ripping from disc,
YOU get to choose the quality of both video and audio vs. strangers in the cloud, so- if you like- you can choose a
better quality setting than Apple chooses.
Ripping your own video- just like ripping audio from CDs- will yield files you can enjoy in the Mac's TV app just like you enjoy the latter in the Music app. And both ripped video and ripped Music will flow to AppleTV Computers App via home sharing, where you can enjoy your 800 videos + future purchases, MINUS all of the promotional stuff that the AppleTV app slings in every open.
Otherwise, you can wait and hope Apple will someday get around to introducing formerly-removed features as brand new, "we think you'll love it" features again. Maybe they will. Maybe they won't. But you have the power to adapt to an alt way today if you want it... and cut most Apple and Studio shenanigans mostly out of the equation. Think different.
