The tile knows what's on

A list of live channels used to be a list of names. Now the tile for a channel shows you what it is carrying right now, and that changes what the page is for.

Open the Screens page on your phone and look at a live-TV scene. If a game is on that channel, the tile shows the two team crests facing each other, the score and the clock. If a series is on, it shows the show's artwork. If it is a news channel at three in the afternoon, it shows the station's logo. You have not told it any of this.

Where the picture comes from

Every tile asks the hub one question: what is on this channel now? The hub answers in one of three ways, and it tries them in a fixed order.

• A game. It reads the programme guide for the channel, or the channel's own name, and looks for a fixture in today's slates across the major leagues. A match comes back with each team's crest, the score and the state of play.
• A show. If it is not a game and there is a title, it looks the title up against a television database and returns the wide artwork, because a poster is tall and a tile is wide.
• The channel. Otherwise, the station's logo. And if there is no logo anywhere, it draws a card with the channel's initials on a colour derived from its name, so two unknown channels never look the same.

The order is the whole argument. A sports channel's guide entry will often name something that happens to exist on a film database. Crests are always the better answer when a game is really on, so a game beats a poster, and a poster beats a logo.

Working from almost nothing

Media servers get clean data. Live channels from a provider mostly do not. A programme guide covers some of them, and the rest tell you their name and nothing else.

So the matcher reads free text. It normalises the name, decides which leagues to search from the words in it, and counts how many teams it can find as whole words. Then it applies a time window that depends on how confident it is. A title naming both teams is the guide saying this game is the programme, so it counts all day, through the pregame and the replay. A channel named after one team proves nothing about today, so it only counts near kickoff. That one rule is why the tiles stopped going blank at night.

Why it matters on a phone

Because the Screens page is where you decide what goes where, and a decision needs to see the options. Fifteen channel names in a list are a lookup job. Fifteen tiles, three of them showing games with scores, is a glance. You put the close one on the bar and the blowout on the patio without opening anything.

It also updates while you watch. A score on a tile is a score, not a screenshot.