Hiding Unused Channels in IBO Player on Apple TV 4K
This guide is for the viewer who opens IBO Player, sees a wall of channels scrolling off the bottom of the screen, and wonders why finding the news takes longer than watching it. By the end you will know what tools IBO Player gives you for shortening that list, how to use them with the Apple TV remote, what to expect afterwards, and when a slow or unresponsive list has nothing to do with the app at all.
Quick answers
- Will hidden channels stay hidden if I restart the app?
Yes. IBO Player retains your hidden-channel settings between sessions. You can reverse any of those choices at any point through the app's settings, where there is a dedicated section for viewing and managing hidden channels. Nothing is removed from the system permanently.
- Can I use the favourites list as my only list and ignore everything else?
Absolutely. Once your favourites list is built, you can go straight to it every time you open the app and never touch the full channel list again. For most viewers this is the quickest route to the content they actually watch.
- What happens to my favourites and hidden channels if I delete and reinstall IBO Player?
Reinstalling the app typically clears locally stored settings, including your favourites list and your hidden-channel choices. Reactivation is straightforward because the account is tied to the device's MAC address and key, but you will need to rebuild your lists from scratch.
- Can the same account be used on a second Apple TV?
The account is linked to the MAC address and device key of a specific Apple TV, so it cannot simply be transferred to another device. If you need to move to a new Apple TV, contact your provider to arrange reactivation on the new device.
What IBO Player offers before you change anything
IBO Player on the Apple TV 4K does not ask you to type a username and password. Instead, it identifies your device by its MAC address and device key — both are displayed inside the app as soon as you open it, with no digging through settings required. When you subscribe, those two values are sent to the provider, and the access details arrive by e-mail shortly after payment is confirmed. The practical consequence is that the account belongs to that specific Apple TV, not to you as a person who could log in anywhere.
All content arrives over your existing broadband connection. No satellite dish, no cable socket — just the router you already have. The channel list that loads reflects exactly what the provider supplies: every group, every entry, nothing filtered by default.
IBO Player gives you two ways to cut that list to something manageable. The first is a favourites list, where you mark individual channels and then use that shorter list as your starting point, leaving the full catalogue untouched in the background. The second is hiding channels, which removes specific entries from the normal view entirely; they remain on the system but stop appearing as you browse.
Used together, these two tools can take a list that runs to thousands of entries and reduce your everyday experience to a few dozen channels you actually care about.
Build your favourites list first
The sensible order is to mark the channels you watch before you start hiding anything. If you hide first, it is easy to bury something you later realise you wanted, and recovering it takes longer than adding it to favourites would have done in the first place.
Scroll to any channel in IBO Player and press and hold the clickpad on the Apple TV remote. A context menu appears for that channel. Select the option to add it to favourites, then move on to the next one. Repeat this for every channel you watch regularly. When you are done, switching to the favourites section gives you a list of perhaps a dozen entries rather than several thousand.
There is no automatic process that fills the list based on viewing history — each channel is added by hand. That sounds tedious, but if you have a clear sense of what you watch, it rarely takes more than ten or fifteen minutes.
Working group by group makes it faster and less likely you will miss something. Open the sports group, go through it, add what you want, then move to films, then series. Jumping around at random makes it hard to know whether you have covered everything.
If your household also uses a MAG device, the same group-by-group approach applies there too — there is more detail on the subject in this guide to building a short favourites list on the MAG 324.
Hiding channels you will never watch
Once your favourites list is in place, hiding the channels you have no interest in tidies up the full view as well. The process mirrors adding a favourite: highlight the channel, hold the clickpad to open the context menu, and choose the option to hide it. The channel disappears from normal browsing but is not deleted.
If you change your mind, IBO Player's settings include a section for managing hidden channels, where you can restore individual entries. Nothing is permanent.
Again, working through one group at a time is the most reliable approach. Finish one group before moving to the next, and you will not find yourself later wondering why a channel has vanished.
One thing worth checking: if you hide a channel that you had already added to your favourites, it may remain visible in the favourites list even after it is hidden from the main view. The two lists are managed separately, so look in both places if something seems inconsistent.
For navigating specific themed groups — wildlife and nature content, for instance — the same group-browsing logic applies, as covered in this piece on browsing nature and wildlife channels.
Keep in mind that updating the app occasionally is part of keeping things running smoothly. The exyuiptv.tv site has a detailed walkthrough for updating IBO Player on Apple TV safely; the steps translate closely to the 4K model even though the guide focuses on an earlier version.
When the problem is the network, not the app
A channel list that loads slowly, or channels that stutter when you switch between them, can look like a settings problem but usually is not. Before adjusting anything in IBO Player, consider where the Apple TV sits in relation to the router.
A device relying on Wi-Fi from the other side of the flat — through two or three walls — will rarely get a stable enough signal for smooth streaming. The symptoms are consistent: sluggish list loading, brief freezes on channel changes, or the app closing unexpectedly. Rearranging your favourites will not fix any of that.
An Ethernet cable from the router to the Apple TV removes the problem entirely if your furniture allows it. If a cable is not practical, moving the Apple TV closer to the router or temporarily reducing demand on the network — particularly if someone else in the household is transferring large files at the same time — often makes an immediate difference.
A router that has been running for weeks without a restart can also slow things down in ways that look like an app fault. Switching it off, waiting a minute, and switching it back on again is a dull solution, but it works more often than it deserves to.
For relaxed background viewing — something playing quietly while you eat, say — a perfectly curated list matters less than having one reliable channel within easy reach. There is a piece here about television as background sound during a relaxed meal at home that touches on exactly that kind of watching.
Once your list is sorted, all the content from Balkans IPTV reaches the Apple TV directly over your home connection, with no aerials or cable boxes involved. If you watch a lot of Serbian-language content and want to know how to navigate within specific channel groups, there is further reading on finding Serbian films within the Serbia group.