The provider, not the app. When the server responds to IPTV Smarters Pro with the channel list, each channel arrives already tagged with a category, commonly by country, language, or genre such as news, sports, or kids. The app simply renders those categories as a menu you can open. This is why category names and structure can look completely different between two providers even though both are running inside the exact same app. If a provider organizes its list badly, with vague or duplicate category names, no app setting fixes that. It's a property of the playlist itself, decided upstream of anything the app controls.

Use the search function inside the app rather than scrolling category by category, especially on a list with tens of thousands of entries. Typing part of a channel's name filters the full list instantly, regardless of which category it sits in. For channels you return to often, favoriting them creates a shortlist that sits separately from the main categories, so you're not hunting through the same folder every time you sit down to watch. Between search and favorites, most people rarely need to browse the raw category list once their setup is a few days old.

You can hide categories, favorite channels, and in most versions reorder the category list itself, but you can't reorganize individual channels into new custom groups the provider didn't create in the first place. Those display choices live on your device and don't touch the underlying list your account has access to on the server. If you switch to a new phone or box, you'll need to redo favorites and hidden categories there too, since those preferences aren't stored on the server alongside the channel list itself, only locally on the device you set them up on.

Channels are continuous, live streams you tune into like a normal TV channel, running on a fixed schedule you don't control and can't rewind past the buffer window. Video-on-demand, shown in its own tab, is a library of individual titles you start whenever you want and can pause or rewind freely from the beginning. Both pull from the same account and the same server, but they're built and organized differently inside the app itself. IP4KTV pairs 54,000+ live channels with 219,577+ VOD titles, so both categories of viewing sit inside the one login, no separate signup required.