Spectrum TV app

By Josh C., 14 March, 2020

Forum
tvOS and Apple TV Apps

maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the Spectrum TV app is a whole lot more accessible on my iPhone than it is on my Apple TVs. does anybody know ways to navigate the on-demand section on the Apple TV version of the app, and how to turn on audio descriptions? both of these tasks are very easy for me to do on my iPhone.

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By Survivor Wolf on Sunday, March 22, 2020 - 22:21

Apple TV, being a large screen platform is meant to be navigated in a more spacial way than iPhone. For this reason, Apple made the Follow Focus and Direct Touch rotor settings. These basically move the focus up down left and right according to the visual layout of the screen. You'll have a lot more success with this app and others using these modes. Apple has made it so there can be multiple panels to one screen, and the only way to get between these panels is with these navigation modes.
With Follow Focus, if you swipe up, down, left or right, focus will move to the closest item in that direction. You can do the same action with Direct Touch by tapping the four edges of the touch surface like a virtual directional pad. If you swipe in Direct Touch, it acts more like it would if you have Voice Over off, so it will interpret the speed of your gestures. Watch out for this, it can be useful for skimming through content, but you can get lost if you don't realize that it's happening or don't have good control of your finger motions.

In most apps on Apple TV, including Spectrum TV, you can swipe down while in the video player with Direct Touch mode and it will pull up an info section. You can turn on closed captioning, secondary audio and other settings from there. This sometimes works with Follow Focus also, but I've noticed sometimes it doesn't since the OS upgraded to 13. Also, heads up that sometimes secondary Audio shows up as Spanish, you may have to click it and wait to find out which it is playing at the time. For me, it's usually description, but that may be different in other parts of the country.

Hope this helps!

By Josh C. on Sunday, March 22, 2020 - 22:21

thanks for the help. I will try the direct touch mode when I'm having trouble with follow focus. it's going to take some getting used to. I am aware that sometimes the secondary audio is Spanish and not audio descriptions. It depends on what movie or show you're watching. when I was watching some of the harry potter movies the other day it was audio descriptions and it really came in useful on my iPhone. i'm not sure I like the Apple TV user interface. My fire TVs seem more intuitive. I can set up my fire TV remote to control navigation on my Apple TV, but then I lose the rotor settings.