One of the things I love the most about an Android phone is the chameleon ability it has that makes it easy to customize. A process that can also be done on Android TV, albeit with nuances. And is this we can adapt the aesthetics of the screen to our daily use habits, something that we will now see how to do.
We can configure the Android TV screen as we like, whether it is a TV or a set-top box. The process is simple and we can remove content that appears and does not interest us so that what we really want to see comes to the fore.
Customize to our liking
Android TV license change the look and all the suggestions it offers on the screen, from the initial banner to existing channels. Just dive into the different setting options and play with the buttons on the remote.
The first thing we’re going to do is organize the different bands with options that appear on the screen. Some are fixed, in the case of YouTube, Google Play Movies … and others vary depending on the services to which we are subscribed. We can therefore have Netflix, Prime Video, Disney + … we can move them up or down by moving the cursor to the far left of the screen. We will see two arrows (up and down) and the word move. We can now organize this line, if we want it to appear sooner or later.
Besides you can move to the right or to the left with each application of the bar. Simply press and hold the “OK” button until a pop-up menu appears. On the far right there is access to a sort of drawer where the rest of the applications that are not in the bar appear.
We continue now, but going to the menu “Settings” by means of the cogwheel that we can find in the upper right part of the screen.
Within the “Settings” we have to look for the section “Device preferences” then search for another title “Start screen” or a menu of the same name (may change on some devices).
We will look at the section “Customize channels” we can determine which of these services we want to appear on the home screen.
We can also activate “List me”, a bar that brings together the content we have accessed in one place. It is therefore based on our use.
Thanks to the checkbox, we can determine which services we want to activate so they appear on the home screen. For the tests I disabled Google Play Music because I don’t use it.
Also, if we click on “My List” you can organize the channels which are then displayed in the rows of the screen. In some cases, we may have more options that we can turn on or off as we please.
The case of YouTube is a good example, because we have sections such as “Subscriptions”, “Tendencies”, “Recommended” and “Youtube Music”. We can choose which one we want to see and which one we don’t want to see.
Now back to the section “Start screen” within the “Settings” to change the banner that appears at the top. We have two options:
- “Enable video previews”
- “Enable previews with audio”
Can we activate or deactivate one of them to lighten the content displayed on the screen and not be so heavy.
And among the options that appear in the top banner, we can configure what we want to appear according to our preferences. This is what the section is for “Personalize the services” in “Start screen”. If we click on it, it will take us to some of the platforms and apps that we have installed and subscribed to.
We mark the one that interests us to see in the upper banner of the main screen then in “Confirm”. We will see how it appears content that we can confirm, ignore or refuse. Depending on what we mark, the related content will appear in the banner of the main screen.
Under these options appears the possibility of “Reorganize applications” and “Rearrange the games”With this option, we establish the order in which we want the applications to appear in the “Applications” tab of the home screen.
The “Rearrange apps” and “Rearrange games” options do the same. The modifications are visible in the “Applications” tab.
With all these options we can adapt the home screen of a device or TV with Android TV to our liking so that it only shows the content that interests us and that it also does so in the correct order.
