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Release

BoTV 1.3.0: Live TV rebuilt on TV, desktop and phone

Our first stable release. A native Live TV player on Android TV and Fire TV, a full-frame live page on desktop, a new search engine, and a long list of reliability fixes, including an offline launch that no longer logs you out.

Three months after v1.2.0-beta.2, this is the first BoTV build without a beta suffix. The whole release is about one thing: Live TV, rebuilt end to end on the three families of screens BoTV runs on. Below is what changes, device by device, and what got fixed underneath.

Highlights

  • On Android TV and Fire TV, the TV tab is the player. Open it and the last channel resumes, with the guide, favourites and search laid over the video.
  • On Windows and macOS, the live page becomes a full-frame player with the guide and channel picker as overlays.
  • A new search engine, shared by every source, with language detection for live channels.
  • Launching without network no longer signs you out or wipes your sources.
  • A failed catalogue index is retried automatically instead of leaving you with an empty screen until the next restart.

Android TV and Fire TV

The TV player was rewritten as a native, remote-first experience:

  • No more intermediate launch screen. Entering the TV tab starts playback and picks up the live channel where you left it.
  • A full Browse layer: channel grid, live on-screen display, EPG preview, and an Options menu that is entirely navigable with the D-pad.
  • Long-press a channel to add it to favourites. A new Recents group replaces the old History card, and a Favourite card sits in the OSD.
  • Channel search from inside the player, with a 6×6 keyboard designed for the remote and explicit navigation between keys.
  • Timeshift now behaves the way you expect from a live player, and the phantom player rebuilds that could interrupt playback are gone.

Windows and macOS

  • The live page is the player. Guide and channel picker are layers on top of the video rather than separate screens, so switching channels never closes what you are watching.
  • Escape peels off one layer at a time instead of closing everything.
  • Press i to flash the live OSD from the keyboard.

Search and guide

  • One normaliser and one hybrid catalogue index, shared by every source. Search results are consistent whether an item comes from an M3U playlist, an Xtream login or an addon.
  • Live channel language is detected by specificity and weighted by the source profile, which makes cross-source search far less noisy.
  • Genre, episode number and rating are now kept in the guide cache. Long-press a programme to open its card with now and next.
  • Fake “separator” channels that many playlists use as headers are filtered out of the catalogue.

Reliability

This release fixes a set of problems that were hard to see from the outside but hurt a lot when they hit:

  • Launching offline no longer signs you out. Session refresh at startup used to clear the keychain on any error, network failure included. The app fell back to a guest profile, every account source disappeared, and the forced re-login re-indexed the whole catalogue. Only a real authentication refusal invalidates the session now.
  • A failed index is retried in the session, at 30 seconds, 2 minutes and 10 minutes. A server returning 503 or a network that is not up yet no longer leaves the catalogue empty until you restart.
  • Disabled sources are no longer indexed at login, and they no longer raise error notifications.
  • Adding a source now reports honestly: validation failures are visible instead of silent, and an empty index is shown as an explicit empty state.
  • Seek is reliable on TS streams, zapping no longer blocks, and sync no longer tears down a running player.

How to get it

  • Android TV, Fire TV, Windows, macOS: the app offers the update on next launch. New installs are on botv.app.
  • Android phone and tablet: through Google Play.

What’s next

1.3.0 is the Live TV release. The next chapter is already running on a branch, and it changes what BoTV is: not only a player for live channels, but a player for everything you already own.

  • Your own media servers. Jellyfin first, with your library, artwork and episode tracking showing up in the same catalogue as everything else.
  • Your NAS and your files. SMB shares, WebDAV, SFTP, S3 buckets, DLNA devices and plain local folders, indexed and searchable like any other source, with the same resume and cross-device progress.
  • Live TV from an antenna. HDHomeRun tuners as a live source, with the guide, groups and favourites you get for your other live channels.
  • Internet radio, as a live source, right next to your TV channels.

Eleven kinds of source, one catalogue, one player, every screen. The pieces are built; what remains is the platform permissions work (storage access on Android, the macOS sandbox, local network on Apple devices) so they behave the same everywhere. We will ship them as they clear that bar rather than all at once.

If one of these matters to you more than the others, say so on Discord. It helps us pick the order.

As always, BoTV is a player. It ships with no content, no channels and no subscriptions. You connect your own sources. If something in 1.3.0 feels off, tell us on Discord.