Before you touch a setting, check the scope. If every favorite is gone at once, you're looking at a local storage wipe, something reset the small database the app keeps on your device. If only a handful dropped out while the rest still play fine, that's a different problem: the provider likely renumbered or replaced those specific channel IDs upstream, so the app can no longer match your saved favorite to a live channel. Same symptom, two different mechanisms, two different fixes. Testing scope first saves you from clearing data or reinstalling an app when the real fix is just re-favoriting three channels.

Favorites are not stored on the provider's server next to your account. They sit in a local database on your device, linked to the specific playlist entry you added. That matters because anything that resets local app storage, an app update, a forced device cleanup, or you clearing app data, takes the favorites list down with it even though your subscription and login never changed. This is also why reinstalling the same provider on a second device never carries favorites over automatically; it's a fresh local install with nothing saved yet.

Reload or refresh the playlist inside the app without deleting it. If your favorites reappear, the list was never actually lost, the app just needed to re-sync its local cache against the playlist source after a display glitch. If they stay empty after a clean reload, the local database itself was cleared and there is nothing left to restore; at that point you're rebuilding from scratch, not waiting on a sync. This single test tells you in under a minute whether you're dealing with a temporary display glitch or a real data loss, which decides whether the fix costs you five minutes or zero, so run it before anything else.

If you re-entered your playlist link to fix an unrelated problem and picked "add new" instead of "edit," you now have two separate playlist profiles sitting in the app at once. The old one, with your favorites still intact, is simply no longer the active entry; the new one you just created starts completely empty by default. Check the app's profile or playlist list for a duplicate before assuming anything was deleted or corrupted. Switching back to the original profile, or deleting the duplicate and re-editing the correct one instead, restores the full list without rebuilding a single channel by hand.