Playlists and queues

Two related things that people mix up, so it is worth separating them first.

• A playlist is a list you made and named. It persists. It is yours, and you can share it with the household.
• A queue is what is playing right now and what comes after it. Every time you press play you make one, whether you meant to or not. It is temporary.

Both live on the server rather than in the app, which is the reason a queue you build on your phone can be seen and reordered from the other room.

Playlists

A Playlists row sits on your home screen, just under Keep Watching by default. You can move it or hide it like any other row.

Making one

Any film or episode: ⋯ → Add to playlist and pick one, or make a new one there and then. Playlists take films and episodes mixed together, and the same thing twice if you want it twice.

The detail screen

Opening a playlist gives you Play, Shuffle, and the ordered list.

Reorder with the ▲ ▼ buttons on each row and remove with ✕. Reordering is a job for a browser, a phone, or a tablet. On a TV you can view a playlist, jump into it anywhere, and remove things, but not reorder, because reordering a list with a remote control is a bad time. Use your phone, which can steer the TV directly (below).

Resuming a playlist

This is the bit nobody else does properly.

A playlist remembers where you got to, per person, on the server. Play three of nine on the Apple TV, and when you open the playlist on your phone the button says Resume, at the fourth item, at the minute you stopped. There is also Start over.

More than that: an in-progress playlist appears in Keep Watching as a single card marked with a playlist badge, named for the playlist, showing the artwork and progress of the title you are in. Tapping it resumes the whole playlist. Your bare half-watched film does not show up separately and clutter the row.

The position moves as you actually watch, including when episodes auto-advance. It is not just set when you press “play from here”.

Sharing a playlist

⚙ → Shared makes a playlist visible to everyone on the server. They can see and play it; only you can edit it. Anything above someone’s rating cap is filtered out for them.

Queues

The queue is what plays next. You never have to create one, but you can shape it.

The verbs

On any film, show, episode, collection, or playlist:

	Does
Play	Starts it now, replacing what is queued
Shuffle	The same, in a random order
Play next	Slots it in right after what is playing
Add to queue	Puts it at the end of the things you have added
Add to playlist	Nothing to do with the queue. Saves it to a list

Play next and Add to queue are genuinely different and stay different. Play next is “this one after this one”. Add to queue is “and then all of these”.

What goes into a queue

• A film: just it.
• An episode: that episode and the rest of the season and show after it.
• A show or season: its episodes in order, starting at your next unwatched.
• A playlist: its entries in order, starting at your resume point.
• A collection: films as themselves, and each show contributing from its next unwatched episode onwards. Shuffling a collection shuffles the titles, so a series still plays its episodes in order once it comes up.

Seeing and changing it

The player has a queue button while a queue is driving playback. It opens a list where you can jump to anything, remove things, and Save as playlist if the evening turned out well.

Playing the next thing automatically

When the credits start, a card appears with the next item’s artwork and a ten-second countdown, and then it plays. Play now skips the wait, Watch credits cancels it.

If you would rather it always waited for you, turn off Play next automatically in ⚙ Settings → Playback. The card still appears; it just does not count down. The setting is per person and follows you to every device.

When the queue runs out, no card appears. It stops.

Steering the TV from your phone

Open ⚙ Settings → Playback → Steer another device on your phone. It lists your devices that are playing from a queue. Pick the TV and you get its queue: reorder it, remove things, clear what you added, and save it as a playlist. Changes land on the TV immediately, and the Up Next card updates as you edit.

Transport controls (play, pause, skip) stay on the device itself.

Where else the queue shows up

• Lock screen and Bluetooth controls on your phone get skip forward and skip back when the queue has a neighbour, plus the usual play, pause, and scrub.
• The Apple TV top shelf, the row that appears when Multipass is the highlighted app on the Home screen, shows your Continue Watching. Under Settings → Home shelves → Top Shelf you can choose whose it shows, which matters on a shared TV. PIN-locked profiles are never offered.
• The Android TV Watch Next row on the Google TV home screen does the same, with its own picker under Settings → Home shelves.

Both draw from exactly the same data as the in-app Keep Watching shelf, playlists included, so they never disagree with each other.