Search and the Sports Hub

Live, Movie and Show groups are kept separate, and each can contain matching items from different playlists, so the same quick action works in All Playlists without switching your active provider. The same menu also carries the relevant favourite and watchlist actions. Creating a new custom group requires Premium; any groups you already have remain editable. Guide results cover roughly the next two weeks, so searching a film name will find the broadcast as well as the on-demand copy. Recent searches are kept so repeat lookups are one press. The Current playlist / All Playlists choice is remembered too, on this device, so if you search across everything you only have to say so once — it is still there next time you open Search, and after a restart.

A guide result does everything the guide does. Open one and you get the same Watch and Record actions as holding OK on it in the TV guide — record it, schedule it, set a Series Link, set or cancel a reminder, add the channel to Multi-view, and watch a finished programme from catch-up where your provider carries it. A live channel result offers Record live and Multi-view the same way. Actions your provider or your box cannot do are not shown at all; actions your plan does not include are greyed with the plan they need.

Every result is organisable, whichever playlist it came from. Favourites, watchlist and groups work on a film or show found in another TV service exactly as they do on one from the service you are watching — the menu acts on the item’s own provider, so nothing is switched behind your back.

Leaving a result and coming back keeps your place. Play a channel, open a film, open a show, or jump to the TV guide from a result, and Back brings you straight back to the same search: the same text, the same Current playlist / All Playlists choice, the same chip, any group you had expanded with Show all, the same position in the list, and the same result under the highlight. The keyboard is not reopened over the top of it. Only when there is nothing to come back to does the cursor start in the search box again.

An All Playlists search never finds less than a Current playlist one. It always includes the service you are watching, plus every other service the current profile may use. If one service cannot be reached, the results from the others still appear and a strip above them names the service that failed, with Try again — a single unreachable provider no longer empties the whole screen. And if nothing can be searched at all, TiviGlass says which it is rather than reporting no matches: no TV service has been added yet — with an Add a TV service button right there — or this profile is not allowed to browse any of them.

Turn on spoiler-free mode to hide scores until you choose to see them. Fixtures are read out of your guide data, so how much detail appears depends on how good your EPG source is — and on a very large channel list the first visit takes a while to read through it all. Matches appear as they are found rather than all at once, and the heading says “Still searching your guide” until the sweep is done, so you can start watching before it finishes.

On capable devices the hero plays the match behind it. While the hub is showing its own pick it plays with sound; as soon as you focus a match card the hero follows your focus and goes silent, so arrowing along the rails never starts audio you did not ask for. It also waits for your focus to settle for about a second before changing channel, so moving quickly through a rail does not tune every match you pass. Press OK to watch a match properly.

Following uses the same engine as Series Links, so recordings land in the normal Recordings section and obey your storage limits. Auto-recording needs a plan that includes recording.