Five years ago today, Channels hit the Apple TV App Store for the first time. What started as an experiment, became the default way many of us watch TV.

channels turns 5 years old

Five Years

We can’t believe it either. Not only have we been working on Channels for five years, many of you have been using Channels for live TV for that long too! How crazy is that?

To celebrate five years, we’ve added a fun timeline that explores the history of Channels.

How did we get here?

Channels started as an experiment. We just wanted to see if we could get the new (at the time) Apple TV to play back the broadcast video that came from HDHomeRun TV tuners. It worked well.

What we thought would be a simple app to watch on garage and kitchen TVs, became the primary way people were watching TV in their living rooms. So we started to expand the experience.

A couple months later, we added buffering so you could pause and rewind. We knew we had something exciting, so we went all in on making Channels as great as it could be.

A few months later we announced that we would begin work on building a whole DVR for Channels. Our fans were on board immediately. After months of building and testing and building and testing we launched it to great fanfare. The rest is history.

Our Fans

Throughout these five years, we’ve always included you, our fans, in our process. Thanks to our amazing community that have suggested features, tested betas, reported bugs, and helped us test fixes for those bugs.

Without your help, we wouldn’t have an app that so many people love.