Airwave Weekly (18 September 2026)

Weekly highlights

• You can now build a channel three ways: a metadata filter, Plex playlists and collections, or a hand-picked list. Playlists and collections was one of the most-requested items on the roadmap.
• The AI assistant now understands and edits all three kinds of channel, playlists and manual picks included.
• The AI lineup builder is now something you can watch and control while it runs: live progress for every step, a scrubber to replay a run, a Stop button that really stops the work, applying a preview without paying to re-plan, and rebuilding a single channel.
• Rewinding and fast-forwarding now show a live preview and commit one seek when you stop, on every platform except Roku.
• On the desktop app and in the browser, you can click and drag the scrubber with a mouse.
• The web player has a proper mouse-and-keyboard mode.
• Self-hosting with Docker is now a single command.
• Android TV is approved, so every major TV platform is covered. The Linux desktop client shipped too.

Three modes for building a channel

A channel used to always be a metadata filter. That is still the default and the most powerful option, but it isn't how everyone thinks about a channel, so the editor now starts by asking how you want to build this one.

With a filter, you pick a genre, rating, or decade and Airwave turns it into a rolling schedule. That is the default, and it works exactly as before.

Playlists and collections lets you choose one or more of your Plex playlists or collections, and Airwave combines them into the channel. Shows and seasons expand to their episodes on their own, and the order you list them in is the play order. This was one of the most-requested items on the roadmap, and it's the quickest way to turn work you already did in Plex into a live channel.

Manual mode lets you hand-pick individual movies, shows, seasons, and episodes with an instant library search. Drill into a show for a whole season or specific episodes. A whole show stays live, so a newly added episode joins the channel on the next build.

Ordering, strategy, weighting, bumpers, and scheduling all work the same whichever mode you pick.

The AI assistant now works with all three modes

The channel assistant now understands all three kinds of channel. It reports each channel's mode, a playlist channel's sources, and a sample of a manual channel's items, instead of showing them as blank filters, and it can build or edit any of the three (it asks for your approval before it changes anything). It can also browse your playlists and collections and drill into a show's episodes. Filters stay the default, and it only creates a playlist or manual channel when you ask for one.

Watch the AI build your lineup, and control it

If you use the AI to build a whole lineup, it is no longer a black box.

• Every step now shows live progress on a timeline as it happens: analyzing your library, planning, building each channel, and assigning numbers, with token and cost counts along the way.
• A scrubber at the bottom of the run page lets you drag back through a run and see what happened, and in what order.
• Stop really stops now. It aborts the model calls in progress, so the work and the billing end right away, and a stalled run can no longer resume later and quietly rebuild your lineup with old settings.
• A dry run already checks every channel's filter, so you can turn that preview into a real lineup with no AI and no re-planning, which costs nothing.
• If one channel isn't right, rebuild just that one in place. It keeps its number and package and leaves the rest alone.

Smoother rewinding and fast-forwarding

Rewinding used to fire a full seek on every press, so backing up a minute meant six reloads. Now the arrows slide a live preview while the video keeps playing, and the real seek happens once, about half a second after you stop. This works on every client except Roku: the webOS and browser player, the desktop app, and the Apple TV, Fire TV, Android TV, and iPad apps, including press-and-hold on the remote. If you use a mouse, you can also click anywhere on the bar to jump, or drag the thumb to scrub, on the desktop app and in the browser.

A mouse-and-keyboard mode for the web player

Plenty of people run the web player in a browser instead of on a TV, so it now has a mode built for that: keyboard shortcuts for play, pause, back, and changing channels; click the video to play or pause; hover to highlight controls; click once in the guide to focus a program and again to tune it; and the mouse scrubbing above. A real TV build is unaffected, since all of this is limited to the browser.

Install the Docker stack with one command

You can now set up the whole Docker stack in one line. On Linux, macOS, or WSL:

curl -fsSL https://www.getairwave.tv/install.sh | sh

On Windows, in PowerShell:

irm https://www.getairwave.tv/install.ps1 | iex

It checks for Docker, asks a few questions with sensible defaults (including finding your local IP), generates your passwords and secrets, writes the compose file and a documented .env, and starts everything. Run the same command again any time to update in place, or to uninstall. Docker is now the recommended way to self-host.

Platforms

Android TV is approved. With that, every major TV platform is covered: Apple TV, Fire TV, Roku, and Android TV in their stores, Samsung and LG sideloadable today, the browser everywhere, and native Windows, macOS, and Linux desktop apps. The Linux desktop client became fully available this week too, and it self-updates like the others.

Pick your platform on the downloads page.

Site and docs

Blog posts have comments now, so you can sign in with your GitHub account to reply and react. The home page got a redesign, and shipped roadmap items now move to the top of the list with a green check so you can see what's done.

That's the week. If you want to steer what comes next, the roadmap is where you vote, and the full history is always in the changelog.