Moving Your IPTV Favorites to a New Provider: What Survives the Move

By IPTVever Team · Published September 19, 2026

Your favorites do not follow you to a new IPTV provider. In TiViMate, IPTV Smarters Pro and Smart IPTV, a favorites list points at channels on one particular line, and the new provider’s channels are different entries even when the names look the same. The better news is that most of what took time to set up, such as playback settings, decoder choice, buffer size and the look of the guide, stays with the app. What has to be rebuilt is the list itself, the group order, the guide mapping and any parental locks. With fifteen minutes of preparation before the switch, moving your IPTV favorites to a new provider is a twenty-minute job, not a lost weekend.

Why favorites belong to the line, not to you

When you mark a channel as a favorite, the app does not store “the evening news channel”. It stores a pointer to one entry in one provider’s list: that line’s channel ID, stream address and group. A different provider’s list is built by different people, with different IDs, different group names and usually different channel names as well. The same channel might be listed under its plain name on one line and, on another, with a country prefix, a quality tag such as FHD or HEVC, and a backup copy underneath.

That is why no player can reliably match two lists on its own, and why restoring an old backup onto a new line gives you the old line’s favorites, pointing at channels that no longer answer. The practical answer is not an import tool. It is a written list of what you watch, made before the switch, and a quick way of adding it again.

What carries over, app by app

Two notes on that table. First, “stays with the app” only holds if you add the new line alongside the old one. Clearing the app’s data or reinstalling it to start fresh wipes everything, including the settings that would have survived. Second, the guide row matters more than it looks. A guide source you added by hand for the old line, left in place, keeps trying to match its listings against the new channel names, and the result is a guide that is blank or wrong on half the channels.

Before you switch: capture the list in fifteen minutes

1. Take a photo of the favorites screen on every TV, scrolling so every entry appears in a picture. This records the order people are used to, which matters more to the household than the channels themselves.
2. Type the list into a phone note, one channel per line, in order, with the position number people use.
3. Note the groups you hid or moved, and any group locked behind a PIN.
4. Write down the guide settings: the device time zone, the app’s timeshift or offset, and any guide address you added by hand.
5. Save the old login and M3U link in the same note, so you can go back if the new line disappoints.
6. Take an app backup where the app offers one, as described in the next section.

Repeat it on every device that has its own list. Favorites are stored on each device separately, so the living-room TV and the bedroom stick may well hold two different lists, and the person in the bedroom will notice if theirs is the one that gets forgotten.

Backing up the app itself

TiViMate

TiViMate offers backup and restore options, found in the general section of its settings. Save the file to the device’s storage or a USB stick. A backup is worth having before any switch because it lets you put the whole app back exactly as it was, playlists, settings and the favorites for those playlists, if the new line fails and you want to return. What it cannot do is translate your favorites onto the new provider’s channels, for the reasons above.

IPTV Smarters Pro

Smarters has no backup file worth relying on for this. Your backup is the old user entry itself. Keep it in the user list, untouched, until the old term expires, and create the new line with Add User rather than Edit, which would overwrite it along with its favorites.

Smart IPTV

Smart IPTV holds one playlist per TV, registered against the television’s MAC address, and uploading a new one replaces the old with no undo. Your backup is the old M3U link, saved before you upload anything. The activation you paid for stays with the TV, so changing provider does not mean paying for it again. The Smart IPTV guide covers the upload itself.

Rebuilding favorites fast

With the list on your phone, the rebuild is mechanical. Work through it in order and resist the urge to browse the new line while you do it; browsing is what turns twenty minutes into an evening.

In TiViMate

With the new line added as its own playlist, open it and use search: type the first few letters of each channel from your note, then long-press OK on the right result and add it to favorites. Adding them in the order of your note leaves little reordering to do afterward. Then hide the groups you never open, which clears thousands of irrelevant channels out of the way. The TiViMate guide covers adding the playlist.

In IPTV Smarters Pro

Log in as the new user, open Live TV and use search. With a TV remote, a long press on a channel brings up the option to add it to favorites; on a phone or tablet, press and hold the channel. Favorites then have their own category in the channel list. The Smarters guide shows the login screens if you are adding the user for the first time.

Choosing between duplicates

The new list may carry the same channel three times: a 4K version, an FHD version and a backup. Put the one that held up best during your peak-hour test into favorites. If you want a fallback, add the next-best copy directly under it, so switching is one button press when the first one pauses. Keep the list to what people actually watch. Thirty well-chosen entries beat three hundred.

Getting the guide right on the new line

• Give it time on the first load. The first guide download on a new line can take a few minutes, and the grid can look empty until it finishes.
• Remove guide sources you added for the old line. With an Xtream Codes login, the new provider’s guide arrives with the channels; an old manual source only confuses the matching. The Xtream Codes page explains what the login brings with it.
• Fix the clock before the timeshift. Set the device clock to automatic first, then set the app’s timeshift to zero, and change it only if the listings are still off. Adjusting both at once is how a guide ends up two hours wrong.
• Report channels with no listings. A few blank rows usually mean a mapping gap on the provider’s side. Send support the exact channel names; it is theirs to fix, not yours.

Recordings and catch-up

Recordings made in TiViMate, a Premium feature, are ordinary video files on the storage you picked: internal memory, a USB drive or a network folder. They do not depend on the provider, so a switch does not delete them. Before you remove the old playlist, check they still show in the recordings list; if they do not, the files are still in the folder, and a file player such as VLC will open them. Whatever you do, do not wipe the drive to start clean.

Catch-up is a different matter. It plays from the provider’s archive, not from your device, so the old line’s catch-up ends when that account does. On the new line, catch-up depends on the channel: those offering it carry a marker in the guide, and the length of the archive varies. If there is a program you want to keep, record it; if you only want to watch it later in the week, catch-up usually covers it.

Finish the move, then delete the old line

Keep the old playlist or user until its expiry date, as your way back. After that, delete it, check the parental locks are set on the new line’s groups, and confirm each device opens on the new list. The full changeover, from testing to moving screens, is laid out in our guide to switching IPTV provider. If you are rebuilding because a service vanished rather than by choice, start with what to do when a provider shuts down.

Moving to IPTVever? A 24-hour free trial gives you enough time to rebuild favorites on one screen and see how the guide maps onto your channels before you pay anything. Plans start at $15 for a month on one connection, and support on WhatsApp will take the list of channels with blank listings off your hands.

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