How to Switch from TiviMate to Tuneline (2026 Migration Guide)

TiviMate is, by a wide margin, the most-used IPTV player on Android TV and Fire TV. If you've been using it for years and you're reading this, you probably hit one of three walls:

• You bought a Mac, a Windows laptop, or an iPhone — and TiviMate isn't available there.
• Your TiviMate Premium subscription auto-renewed and you started to wonder what you were paying for.
• Your Fire Stick got slow, you switched to a Google TV box or a Mac mini, and you want one player on every device instead of three.

Whatever pushed you here, this guide walks the migration end-to-end: exporting from TiviMate, importing into Tuneline, what carries over cleanly, what doesn't, and how to set up the sync so this is the last time you have to do this.

If you're still deciding, the short version: TiviMate is excellent on a single Android TV box. Tuneline is the cross-platform player you want if you watch on more than one screen. Both are honest answers to different questions.

Before You Start: What Actually Migrates

There's no automatic TiviMate → Tuneline importer, and there can't really be one — TiviMate's database lives inside the app sandbox on your Android TV, and the format is private. The good news is that you don't need an importer for the thing that matters most: your playlist source (the M3U URL or Xtream Codes credentials). That's the only piece you actually entered by hand, and it carries you to any player on any platform.

Here's the honest carries-over table:

Total hands-on migration time, in my testing: 5–10 minutes for someone with one playlist and a normal-sized favorites list.

Step 1 — Find Your Playlist Source in TiviMate

The single most important thing to recover from TiviMate before you uninstall anything is your playlist source. Two cases:

If you used an Xtream Codes login

Open TiviMate → Settings → Playlists → tap your active playlist. You should see three fields TiviMate calls Server URL, Username, and Password. Write all three down. These are the only three things you need to set up the same provider in any other IPTV player on any platform, ever.

If you used a raw M3U URL

Open TiviMate → Settings → Playlists → tap your playlist. You'll see a single URL starting with http:// or https:// and ending with .m3u, .m3u8, or ?type=m3u_plus&output=ts. Copy the entire string.

If you lost the original email from your IPTV provider with the credentials, this is the moment to recover it from TiviMate before you uninstall. Once the app is gone, the URL is gone.

Also write down your EPG source if you set one manually

If you added a custom XMLTV / EPG URL in TiviMate (Settings → EPG Sources), grab that URL too. If you let TiviMate use the Xtream EPG automatically, you don't need to do anything — Tuneline pulls it from Xtream the same way.

Step 2 — Install Tuneline on Your Primary Device

Pick whichever device you actually sit in front of most evenings — that's your "primary." On every other device, sync will do the work.

• Google TV / Android TV — search "Tuneline" in the Play Store on your TV, install. (The TV listing is a separate APK from the phone listing; they sync to the same account.)
• Mac — download from tuneline.app, notarized DMG, or install from the Mac App Store.
• Windows — download from the Microsoft Store.
• Linux — Flatpak from Flathub.
• iPhone / iPad — App Store.
• Android phone — Play Store.

If your old TiviMate device is a Fire Stick, the cleanest path is to use a different device as your primary for setup (Mac, Windows, phone — anywhere with a real keyboard makes pasting URLs less painful), then sync down to the Fire TV / Google TV box from there.

Step 3 — Add Your Playlist to Tuneline

Open Tuneline. The first-run onboarding prompts you for a source. Pick one:

• Xtream Codes — paste the three fields from Step 1. Tuneline will auto-fetch the channel list, VOD catalog, and EPG.
• M3U URL — paste the URL from Step 1. Tuneline will fetch and parse the playlist. If you have a separate XMLTV URL, paste that into Settings → EPG → Add EPG source.
• Stalker Portal — paste the portal URL and your MAC address. (Tuneline supports Stalker as well as M3U / Xtream — TiviMate didn't really, so this is more of a future-proofing note.)

Once the playlist loads, you should see a familiar channel grid. Live TV, Movies, and Series tabs across the top (assuming your provider exposes VOD and Series — most Xtream panels do, most raw M3Us don't).

Step 4 — Create a Tuneline Account (and Sign In Everywhere)

This is the step that pays back the most over the life of the app. In Tuneline → Settings → Account, sign up. It's free. Email + password, or Google, or Apple — whichever you prefer.

The moment you sign in, Tuneline starts syncing your playlist credentials, favorites, watch history, watch positions, parental PIN, hidden channels, and recording schedules to its backend. On every other device where you install Tuneline and sign in with the same account, that whole bundle appears within seconds.

This is the single biggest day-one difference from TiviMate. TiviMate's "backup" is a paid feature, manual, per-device, and TiviMate-only. Tuneline's sync is free, automatic, continuous, and cross-platform. (For the longer explanation of why most IPTV players don't sync, see our post on why IPTV favorites disappear across devices.)

Step 5 — Rebuild Your Favorites (Once)

This is the only genuinely manual step. Spend ten minutes going through your channel list and favoriting the ones you actually watch. Most users find this is faster than it sounds — once you start, you realize you only really watch ~30–80 channels even if your provider gives you 3,000.

Tuneline → tap the ☆ next to any channel to favorite. Favorites appear in the sidebar under "Favorites" and sync across devices instantly.

If you used custom categories in TiviMate to group channels ("Sports I Care About," "Background TV," "Kids"), Tuneline supports the same thing — favorite the channels you want in a group, and you can hide everything else with a toggle in Settings → Categories.

Step 6 — Set Up Parental Controls (If You Used Them)

Tuneline → Settings → Parental → set a 4-digit PIN, lock the categories you want gated (typically adult / IPTV "+18" groups, sometimes News if you have small kids), set an age threshold. Same shape as TiviMate, syncs to every device on the same account.

Step 7 — Install on Every Other Device, Sign In

Now that the primary device is set up and synced, every other device is a one-minute job:

1. Install Tuneline on the device (TV, phone, laptop, whatever).
2. Sign in with the same account.
3. Wait 5 seconds. Your playlist, favorites, watch history, and parental PIN are already there.

You should not have to paste your Xtream credentials a second time. If you do, sync is misconfigured — open a support ticket from the app.

Step 8 — Uninstall TiviMate (Or Don't, Yet)

Two schools of thought:

• Uninstall immediately. Forces you to actually use Tuneline for a week, which is when you'll discover the rough edges (and let us know).
• Keep TiviMate installed for a week as a backup. Useful if you have a complex setup with multiple providers, customised EPGs, or a recording schedule you weren't able to replicate yet.

Either is fine. I lean toward keeping TiviMate as backup for one week, then nuking it once you're sure everything is in Tuneline and synced.

What You'll Notice First

If you've been on TiviMate for years, a few things will feel different:

• The UI is slightly more "app-like" and less "10-foot UI" on phones and laptops. On TV (Google TV / Fire TV), it's a proper leanback layout with D-pad navigation, but on a Mac or phone it looks like a normal modern app rather than a TV remote interface.
• Settings have fewer toggles. TiviMate is deeply customisable in a way that some power users love and others find overwhelming. Tuneline ships with sensible defaults and exposes the toggles that actually matter; expect fewer knobs.
• Recordings work differently. TiviMate records to local storage on the Android device. Tuneline supports recording on desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux) where you have a real filesystem to write to. (See our DVR / record live TV guide for setup details.)
• No "EPG color schemes" or "20 different player skins." Tuneline is one cohesive design across every platform. If you loved customising TiviMate's appearance, you'll miss this; if you didn't, you'll appreciate not having to.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Tuneline free? How does the pricing compare to TiviMate Premium?

Tuneline is free to use on every platform. Sync, EPG, parental controls, favorites — none of it is paywalled. There's an optional one-time "Tuneline Pro" lifetime upgrade for power features (multi-stream, DVR scheduling, etc.) — explicitly a one-time purchase, not a subscription. TiviMate Premium is a recurring subscription. For most users, the unsubscribed Tuneline experience covers everything TiviMate Premium does.

Can I use Tuneline on my Fire Stick?

Tuneline is not currently in the Amazon Appstore (see our distribution post for the long story), but Google TV / Android TV are fully supported. If you're on a Fire Stick, the recommended path is to use Tuneline on your other devices and either move to a Google TV box at some point, or stick with TiviMate on the Fire Stick specifically and Tuneline elsewhere. They can coexist.

Do I need to cancel my TiviMate subscription?

That's between you and TiviMate. If you uninstall the app, the sub doesn't auto-cancel — you need to go into Google Play → Subscriptions → TiviMate Premium → Cancel. Worth doing if you're sure you're switching, because it'll happily auto-renew otherwise.

Will my Xtream Codes provider notice I changed players?

No. From the provider's side, a stream request looks the same regardless of which player makes it. The User-Agent string differs (TiviMate identifies as TiviMate, Tuneline identifies as Tuneline), and a small number of paranoid providers actively whitelist specific User-Agents — but that's rare and usually fixable from the provider's side.

What about my recorded shows in TiviMate?

TiviMate stores recordings on the Android device's local storage (typically in /sdcard/TiviMate/Recordings/). If you want to keep them, copy them off via USB or a file manager before you uninstall TiviMate. Tuneline records to whatever folder you point it at on Mac / Windows / Linux but doesn't import old TiviMate recordings.

Can I run TiviMate and Tuneline side-by-side?

Yes. They don't interfere with each other. Lots of users keep TiviMate on the TV and Tuneline on the Mac and phone for a week or two during the transition.

My TiviMate works fine — should I even switch?

If you only ever watch on one Android TV box and you're happy with it, there's no urgent reason to switch. The migration only really pays off when you have (or are about to have) more than one device. That's the moment TiviMate's single-device model becomes a tax.

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The Bottom Line

TiviMate is a good single-device IPTV player. Tuneline is the cross-platform replacement for the IPTV-on-every-screen world most of us actually live in now. The migration takes 10 minutes, the only thing you have to manually rebuild is your favorites, and once you sign into your Tuneline account on the second device, you're done re-doing this for the rest of time.

Install Tuneline on your primary device, paste your playlist source, sign in, and the rest is sync.