It's almost always a long-press, not a menu you have to hunt for. In TiviMate, IPTV Smarters, and STBEmu, you press and hold the channel name in the live list until a small popup appears, then choose Add to Favorites. Some apps use a star or heart icon on the channel row instead, which you tap once to save it. The channel doesn't move or duplicate. It just gets tagged, so it shows up both in the full list and in a separate Favorites group you can open with one click. If you don't see a Favorites tab yet, add one channel first and it will appear.

1. 1Long-press the channel row, then choose Add to Favorites
2. 2A star or heart icon works the same way in apps that use one
3. 3The Favorites tab appears automatically after your first save

The action is the same, but how you trigger it depends on your remote. On a Firestick or Android TV, you hold down the center button on the channel row until the popup shows. On Apple TV, you press and hold on the trackpad remote. With a mouse-driven setup on an Android box or an LG smart TV app, you right-click or long-tap on touchscreens. TiVo Stream 4K and TVIP boxes both follow the same long-press pattern through their remote's select button. The label in the popup menu sometimes reads 'Favorite' instead of 'Add to Favorites,' but it's the same feature.

Favorites are usually tied to a channel's internal ID, not its name or position in the list. If a provider renumbers or reorganizes its channel feed during a routine update, the app can lose the link between your saved favorite and the channel it pointed to, even though the channel itself still exists. This is a real, if occasional, side effect of playlist maintenance rather than a bug in your setup. If a favorite goes missing, re-adding it takes a few seconds and it will hold until the next major reshuffle, which isn't frequent.

Fewer than you'd think. A typical live package runs 54,000+ channels once you count regional and language feeds, and player apps that hold a full list in memory start to slow down once the visible count climbs toward roughly 18,000 channels. Favoriting doesn't delete anything, but a tight list of the 20-40 channels you watch weekly loads faster and scrolls smoother than paging through groups every time. Pair favorites with hiding unused channel groups in the app's settings if you notice lag, since both changes shrink what the app has to render at once.