Channels

New here? Start at Getting started, then come back. Channels live inside packages and draw their media from a connected source. If you'd rather not build channels by hand, the AI assistant can author a whole lineup for you — everything here is what it's writing under the hood.

What a channel is

A channel is two things wired together:

1. A candidate pool — the set of movies and/or episodes it's allowed to play, produced by a definition. Today that definition is a predicate (a filter): "90s comedies", "everything Studio Ghibli", "unwatched sci-fi episodes". Airwave resolves the filter against your media server and gets back a concrete list of items.
2. An ordering — how that pool is laid out: shuffled, or sorted by a field you choose. An optional strategy layers grouping and rotation on top (marathons, round-robins).

From those two inputs Airwave materializes a schedule: a back-to-back, gapless timeline of program slots (plus any bumper breaks) stretching days into the future. The build is deterministic and seed-driven — the same pool + ordering + seed always produce the same lineup, so every viewer tuning in sees the same thing at the same wall-clock moment, and a rebuild reproduces it exactly.

Every channel is bound to exactly one media source (mediaSourceId) and can only be created once that source is connected and synced — there's no media to filter or schedule against otherwise. The create call enforces this (packages/api/src/routers/channels.ts create): it rejects a source that isn't connected, or that has zero synced mediaItems, with a message telling you which step is missing.

Admin UI: Channels → New (apps/web/src/routes/_auth/channels/new.tsx) to create, Channels → <channel> ($channelId.tsx) to edit, preview, and schedule. Both render the same ChannelForm (apps/web/src/features/channels/channel-form.tsx), split into collapsible sections: Details, Options, Content & filter, and Advanced — grouping & rotation.

In this section

Channel identity

The Details and Options sections carry the channel's identity (channel.prisma Channel):

• Name — display name (e.g. "90s Comedies"). Required.
• Number — the guide channel number. Unique across the instance; leave blank on create and Airwave assigns the next free number (max(number) + 1).
• Callsign — a short memorable code, uppercased and capped at 6 chars (e.g. 90SCOM). Normalized on save; optional.
• Description — optional blurb for what the channel is.
• Package — the package this channel belongs to (optional). A channel with no icon or tint of its own inherits the package's.
• Appearance — icon & tint — a Lucide/Phosphor icon plus an accent tint from a fixed palette (services/accents.ts ACCENT_KEYS — purple, blue, teal, green, amber, orange, red, rose, …). The tint is stored as a stable key and each client maps it to its own hues; an unknown key degrades to neutral. Leave both empty to inherit the package's look.
• Active (the header toggle) — the enabled flag. Inactive channels aren't selectable in the guide and are skipped by the schedule jobs.
• Bumpers — a thin per-channel mode (Inherit / Off / Interstitial only / Full). The actual break content is configured globally under Bumpers; a channel only chooses whether and which to show.

Tips & gotchas

• Curate over bare genre sweeps. A single Genre is Comedy can pull in thousands of loosely related items. Tighter, intentional filters (a decade, a studio, a network, a hand-picked set of shows) make a channel that feels authored rather than a firehose — and resolve faster. This is exactly how the AI assistant builds lineups: many narrow channels, not a few giant ones.
• Genre is on the show, not the episode. Filtering TV by genre matches the series' genre; episodes carry no genre of their own. Use episode-level fields (resolution, air date, unwatched) when you mean the individual episode.
• The grouping filter is one level in the UI. The content filter and each grouping rule's filter both cap at one level of sub-groups in the builder (the resolver itself has no depth limit).
• A strategy needs a rebuild to show. Editing the strategy doesn't retro-actively rewrite the live timeline — hit Generate schedule to apply it now, or wait for the next full rebuild.
• Shuffle ignores the sort field. Sort field/direction only matter for a Sorted channel; a Shuffle channel derives its order from the seed.
• Tag values are matched by title. If a filter dropdown is empty, the source may not be synced, or no library of the selected content types carries that tag.

Source map

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See also: Getting started · Packages · Sources · Background jobs · AI assistant