Live Channels app is for watching Live TV. Watch your favourite news, sports, movies and TV shows from various channel sources such as built-in tuner, IP-based tuners and more and show them instantly on your Android TV.
The “Live Channels” app on Android TV is exactly what it sounds like. It’s live channels.
The question, though, is what kind of live channels are we talking about. If you have a TV that uses Android TV for its operating system, Live Channels is where you’ll find your broadcast channels should and antenna be plugged into the TV tuner. That’s obvious enough.
But Live Channels also is part of a TV input framework . That is, other applications can take their live content and pipe it through the Live Channels application.
A prime example of this is HDHomerun. You’ll need the app installed on Android TV, and you’ll still need to run a channel scan like normal. But once that’s done, all of your over-the-air channels will be available in the Live Channels app, alongside anything else that also uses the TV input service framework.
What’s better about that than just using the HDHomerun app? For one, “Live Channels” is far more intuitive than “HDHomerun.” Plop an Android TV novice in front of the UI and there’s a pretty good chance they’ll figure out what “Live Channels” is long before “HDHomerun.” It’s just cleaner.
Steps
Firstly we need to enable the option to install from unknown sources
Click Settings
Click System
Click About
Click Android TV OS build 7 times until you see a message that Developer Options have been enabled
Go back up and open Developer Options
Ensure that USB Debugging is enabled
Go back up until you see the Apps menu item, click that
Click Security & Restrictions
Push the right arrow to move to the right side of the screen where apps are located
Turn on unknown sources for the Downloader app
Software Needed
Live Channels Updated Nov 2020
Live Channels Banner for Chromecast
TVIRL – If you want to add your own M3U Playlists