How to shorten your channel list in IBO Player on an LG TV

What you are working with before you start

IBO Player identifies your LG TV by its MAC address and a device key, both of which the app displays on the activation screen. Your login arrives by email after payment and ties to that specific MAC and key pair — there is no typed username, so the account follows the TV rather than a person. Everything arrives over your home broadband connection; no satellite dish, no cable socket.

Before you touch the channel list, check that the TV's connection is solid. A weak Wi-Fi signal in a room far from the router will make the app feel sluggish, and sluggish menus make editing frustrating. If the TV sits more than a couple of rooms away from the router, a short Ethernet cable run or a powerline adapter usually resolves it cleanly. It is also worth restarting IBO Player completely — close it from the LG Home screen, wait a moment, then reopen — before you begin any list editing, since a fresh session responds more reliably.

One more thing worth confirming: make sure you are running a reasonably current version of IBO Player. Open the LG Content Store, find IBO Player and check whether an update is waiting. Menu labels and options can differ between versions, so having the latest build means the steps in this guide are as close to what you see on screen as possible.

Building a favourites list first

The quickest way to cut through the noise is to build a favourites group before you hide anything. Open IBO Player and go to your full channel list. Highlight a channel with the directional pad on the LG Magic Remote, then press OK to open its options menu. Look for 'Add to favourites' or a star icon — the label varies slightly with the app version, but it sits near the top of the context menu.

Work through the channels your household actually uses and add each one. Sports channels, news, children's content, whatever gets watched regularly. The process is repetitive but quick once you find a rhythm: highlight, press OK, select the favourites option, return to the list, move on. After a couple of dozen channels, your favourites group starts to feel like a proper curated lineup rather than a subset of a sprawling catalogue.

Once you have your favourites built, switch to that group and browse it for a moment. You will almost certainly spot gaps — a channel you forgot — and a few entries you added out of habit rather than genuine use. Trim and add now, while the full list is fresh in your mind, so you do not have to come back to it later.

If you watch Champions League football or want specific sports channels grouped in one place, the favourites approach is especially useful. There is more detail on finding those channels without hunting through a long list in this guide to finding Champions League football channels without the fuss.

Hiding channels you will never use

Favourites shorten what you see at a glance; hiding channels shortens what appears across every list in the app. The two steps work well together and reinforce each other.

In IBO Player, highlight a channel, press OK, and look for a 'Hide channel' or 'Block channel' option in the context menu. Confirm it and the channel disappears from view. It is not deleted — you can restore it later through the app's settings — but day to day it is simply gone, which is exactly what you want.

This step pays off most when you tackle entire categories at once rather than individual channels. Consider working through:

• Foreign-language packages in languages nobody in the household speaks
• Regional duplicates of channels you already have in a preferred region
• Shopping and infomercial streams
• Test streams and placeholder entries that appear at the edges of the list
• Children's channels if you do not have children, or adult channels if you do

Removing a whole block in one pass dramatically compresses the list. What previously took a long scroll from one genre to another becomes a much shorter journey.

After hiding, go into IBO Player's settings and look for the option to set your favourites group as the default startup view. On most versions of the app this sits under 'Player settings' or 'General settings'. Set it once and from then on the app opens straight to your short, curated list rather than the full feed.

When the remote feels unresponsive during editing

Editing a large channel list in IBO Player can occasionally make the LG remote feel unresponsive — a highlight that moves slowly, a context menu that takes a moment to appear. This is almost always a connection issue rather than the app misbehaving.

The first check is straightforward: press the Home button, go to Network settings, and run the connection test. If anything looks uncertain there, restart the router. Unplug it from the wall, wait about thirty seconds, plug it back in, and give it a moment to fully reconnect before returning to IBO Player. A fresh connection session usually restores snappy behaviour.

If Wi-Fi remains unstable in the room where the TV sits, consider the LG TV's wired port. Many LG smart TV models have an Ethernet socket on the back, and a direct cable to the router removes the wireless variable entirely. For a wall-mounted TV where running a cable is impractical, a pair of powerline adapters — plugged into the router at one end and the TV at the other — achieves much the same result through the building's electrical wiring.

There is also a less obvious cause: the LG TV's memory can fill gradually with app cache, which makes everything on the platform feel heavier. Clearing the IBO Player cache — usually found under Settings, then Apps, then IBO Player — does not affect your channel list or login, but it can make the app noticeably more responsive.

Keeping the list tidy over time

Channel line-ups change. New streams appear, old ones drop off, and viewing habits shift with the seasons — a sports package that felt essential in spring may sit unused through summer. A light review every few weeks, adding newly discovered channels to favourites and hiding the ones you stopped watching, prevents the list from creeping back to an unmanageable length.

If more than one person uses the TV regularly, it is worth agreeing on the favourites group rather than one person hiding channels the other person wanted. Hiding is entirely reversible, but it takes a moment to undo and is easily avoided with a quick conversation. A shared favourites group that includes something for everyone — with the full list available via settings whenever something obscure is needed — tends to work better for households with mixed tastes.

For viewers who also watch on a streaming device elsewhere in the house, there is a useful parallel guide covering sensible habits for TiviMate on the Chromecast with Google TV, which approaches the same problem of list management on a different platform.

The IPTV UK-focused service this guide covers delivers its lineup over broadband, which means the channel list is consistent and controlled entirely through the app. No engineer visit, no settings box to configure. The only thing that shapes what you see each evening is the five or ten minutes you put in now to hide what you never watch and surface what you do.