Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Audio / Video
  3. News

Why you may still be missing ESPN and other Disney-owned channels on YouTube TV

Phil Nickinson
By

ESPN, ABC, FX, and other channels owned by Disney have returned to YouTube TV. But if you reorder your live listings so that the channels you actually watch are higher up than the ones you don’t, you likely don’t see those channels at all.

The problem is a bit of a glitch in that not only have the channels in question been pushed to the bottom of the listings in the custom view — they’re actually not even enabled in the first place. And that’s not a new phenomenon. It’s the way it has always worked when new channels are added to YouTube TV and you’re using the custom sort, and so it makes sense (in a perverse, broken sort of way) that it’s the case with the Disney-owned channels as they’ve been added back to YouTube TV.

YouTube TV custom listings.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

It also highlights the problem. These are some high-profile channels — your local ABC affiliate, ESPN, FX, the Disney Channel, and more. These aren’t some of the more niche channels born in the internet age that you’ll find further down the listings. These are channels that YouTube TV was forced to remove, albeit for a little more than a day.

Recommended Videos

And those who aren’t using the default view probably don’t even realize the channels have returned, which is something YouTube TV needs to fix. That said, the custom view is a powerful part of YouTube TV. It allows you to disable channels you’ll never watch and get them out of your listings altogether, saving you valuable screen real estate and scroll time. It also allows you to re-order channels so that the things you’ll watch more often will appear higher up.

Related

Here’s how to re-enable the Disney-owned channels — and anything else that’s new that you might be missing — and move things around in the best order for your preferences:

  1. Go to tv.youtube.com/live in a web browser. (It only works in a browser.)
  2. In the top right, look for Sort. If you’re already using the default sort, you should be good to go.
  3. If you’re already using the Custom view, click Edit to enter the Live Guide settings.
  4. Scroll to the bottom and find any channels that don’t have a red checkmark next to them.
  5. Click the radio button to re-enable the channel.
  6. You can now re-order the channels by grabbing the handles (the four lines) or clicking the overflow menu (three dots) to push them all the way to the top or bottom.

That’s it. Maybe one of these years YouTube TV will actually fix this. Or maybe they consider it to be a feature.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Phil Nickinson
Phil Nickinson
Section Editor, Audio/Video
Phil spent the 2000s making newspapers with the Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal, the 2010s with Android Central and then the…
YouTube TV just added a huge new add-on for $15 a month
Zee Family on YouTube TV.

Zee Family is now available on YouTube TV for $15 a month. Phil Nickinson / Digital Trends

YouTube TV is still limited to the U.S., but it just brought a big piece of the world to the streaming service. The Zee Family add-on brings a number of channels from a range of Indian dialects to the service. It costs $15 a month and has a free seven-day trial.

Read more
YouTube TV tips and tricks: how to get the most out Google’s live TV service
YouTube TV app icon on Apple TV.

There’s a reason YouTube TV has found itself the leader in live-streaming video. In fact, it has about twice as many subscribers to its cable-TV replacement as the next biggest platform. And. among other reasons like price, reliability, and abundance of channels, it is just packed with features.
In fact, YouTube TV has so many features tucked away in there that you’ll be forgiven if you don’t spot them all at first. But we’ve done the legwork. We’ve watched hours and hours of YouTube TV. Weeks and months, really. We’ve flipped all the buttons. We’ve pressed all the switches. (Wait — reverse that.) And we’ve put together a list of what we think are the most important — if not always obvious — YouTube TV tips and tricks. And we're not just talking about NFL Sunday Ticket.
This isn’t everything. There are still a few other places to explore in the settings menu, as well as when you’re watching shows and movies. But these are the YouTube TV tips and tricks we absolutely think you must know.

Record a show to watch later

Read more
This long-awaited YouTube TV feature is a channel-flipper’s dream
The previous channel feature on YouTube TV on a TV.

The move from cable to streaming for live TV changed a lot of things. Choice, for one. (We have more.) Price, for another. (You're likely paying less.) But not all changes were great. If you're of the channel-surfing variety — or love to flip back and forth between two channels — you've likely been missing that feature.

YouTube TV — the most popular streaming service in the U.S. with more than 8 million subscribers — has addressed the latter. After having been teased in some A/B testing for a while now (that is, some folks saw it, and most didn't), it looks like the ability to hop back and forth between two channels is now rolling out more broadly.

Read more