Android TV: How To Stop Android TV Recommending Content To Watch On The Main Screen

Friday, March 6, 2015

Android TV: How To Stop Android TV Recommending Content To Watch On The Main Screen

Nexus Player owners out there may have noticed that every time they launch Android TV (technically just switch to it as it is always on running in the background), they are always greeted with a long list of recommendations. These are typically based on your watching and app habits. Not to mention there seems to be a bit of a bias towards Google Play services. As such you are presented with this long list of things you might want to watch. That can be handy if you do want to watch them, although there is probably a good chance you have very rarely clicked on any of these links.

So maybe you would like to stop recommendations from being displayed? Or maybe you just do not want anyone who sees your TV seeing what type of content you have been watching recently. Well, either way and for whatever reason, you should know that they can be turned off. And fairly easily too.

For the example, we will remove Hulu Plus which seems to keep offering recommendations in spite of not having a Hulu Plus account. Although, you can perform these actions for any app which keeps showing up in your recommendations.

To start, you will need to head down to “Settings”.

From here, head over to “Apps”.

Head to the app you want to ‘silence’.

And once clicked on, scroll down to “Notifications”.

Click on notifications and then click “Off”.

From now on the notifications for that particular app will no longer show up.

If you want to remove Google apps like YouTube or Google Play Movies you will not find them under the normal apps line. Instead, you will have to go down to “System Apps”, as this seems to be where all the Google Apps seem to hide.

From here, you will be able to repeat the procedure above and silence the Google Apps too. What’s more, you can keep removing apps which are showing up in the recommendations.