Quiz and game shows one press away: building your favourites
When a household has mixed tastes — one person lives for quiz nights, another prefers game shows, someone else watches both — scrolling through a long channel list every evening quickly loses its appeal. The answer is not to memorise where everything lives; it is to spend a few minutes once, build a focused favourites list, and then never think about it again. With a little patience the whole job takes less time than making a cup of tea.
Categories and search: your first shortcut
A channel list that runs to tens of thousands of entries looks daunting until you realise it is already sorted. Players such as TiviMate and IPTV Smarters Pro offer a side panel or tab where you can browse by category — entertainment, general, kids and so on — rather than scrolling through everything at once.
Search is faster still. Key in a few letters of a channel name and the list trims itself to what is relevant. For a household that watches both Balkan and international channels, this matters: you do not need to know a channel's position in the list, only part of its name.
The Balkan IPTV channel guide offers categories, a favourites section and search as three separate tools for finding your way around. You do not need all three at once — when building a favourites list, browsing by category and dipping into search is enough to cover everything.
How to build a favourites list in practice
The exact steps vary slightly between players, but the underlying idea is the same everywhere: find a channel, hold it down or open its menu, and select the option to add it to your favourites.
In TiviMate, a long press on any channel opens a context menu with an 'Add to favourites' option. In IPTV Smarters Pro, the star icon beside the channel name does the same job. On a MAG box, the portal keeps its own favourites section, reached through a dedicated button on the remote.
Once you have added your chosen channels, the favourites list becomes its own category — open it and every channel you picked is there, with nothing else in the way. In a household where one person follows quiz shows in English and another prefers them in Bosnian or Croatian, the list can reflect both tastes without either having to compromise.
A practical tip: add channels as you watch rather than sitting down for a big session of browsing all at once. The list builds up naturally, and you are more likely to include the channels you actually return to.
When the app forgets your changes
Sometimes a favourites list disappears after the app restarts or when you switch to a different device. This almost always comes down to one of two things: the app closed before it finished saving, or the favourites are tied to a local profile rather than to the account itself.
The first thing to check is whether you are signed in with the correct credentials. Account details arrive by e-mail shortly after activation. Some players will carry your favourites across when you sign in on a second device; others store that list locally and start fresh on new hardware.
If you are ever connecting from a shared or public network, it is worth knowing how that can affect your session — the guide to using IPTV safely on public Wi-Fi covers the most common pitfalls.
When an app behaves erratically — slow to respond, forgetting settings, freezing between channels — close it completely, clear its cache and reopen it. That resolves the problem in the great majority of cases.
Watching on the big screen: a few points worth knowing
A well-built favourites list is most valuable on a television, where the remote is not well suited to lengthy searches. With the list in place, the gap between switching the TV on and landing on a quiz show shrinks to two or three button presses.
If someone else in the household wants to watch something different at the same time on a laptop, the same account credentials work there too — set the list up wherever feels most convenient, then use it on whichever screen suits the moment.
For households that enjoy a broad mix of content on a larger screen, the walkthrough on browsing Slovenian evening talk shows on a big screen is a useful worked example of navigating the channel guide for a specific kind of programming.
With more than 50,000+ channels available, a favourites list is not a luxury — it is simply the most sensible way to avoid getting lost.
Frequently asked questions
- Can different members of the household have separate favourites lists?
It depends on the player. TiviMate supports multiple profiles, each with its own favourites list, which works well when tastes in the household differ significantly. IPTV Smarters Pro and IBO Player keep one list per account, but if each person signs in with separate credentials, each account maintains its own independent list.
- Why does a channel in my favourites show an error or a black screen?
Adding a channel to favourites does not affect how it streams — if the channel has a playback issue, that issue follows it into the list. Try opening the same channel directly from its category. If it fails there too, the problem is with the stream or your connection rather than with the favourites list itself.
- Will my favourites list survive if I move to a different device?
That depends on the player. Some apps store the list on the device, so you would need to rebuild it after switching hardware. Others attach the list to the account and load it automatically at sign-in. Check the app's settings under the account or sync section to see which approach it uses.