Syncing and finding TV Shows on iPhone

By Jesse Hollington @jhollington ● Thursday, October 4, 2012

Q: I have followed every instruction on how to sync from my iTunes library to my iPhone 4S. There is no obvious menu choice on the iPhone showing TV shows. How can this be accomplished? Thanks!

- Joel

A: There is no specific “TV Shows” app or menu item on the iPhone; assuming that your TV Shows are in fact syncing properly to your iPhone, they will appear in the Videos app, alongside any Movies and Music Videos you’ve synced to your device. Rather than providing a top-level menu for content types, the Videos app instead simply presents Movies, TV Shows, Music Videos in separate sections, so you’ll need to scroll down past any movies that you have loaded onto your iPhone before you’ll see your TV Shows, and then down even further before you’ll see your Music Videos.

TV Shows are still grouped by season, and Music Videos grouped by artist when three or more videos are present. Video Podcasts are also included at the very bottom of the list unless the standalone Podcasts app is installed.

Note that this was a significant change for iPhone users in iOS 5, when Apple replaced the venerable “iPod” application—which included both music and videos in a single app—with the separate “Music” and “Videos” applications from the iPod touch. In the prior iPod application, TV Shows were clearly delineated in their own section, as was just about every other type content.

You can confirm that TV Shows are actually on your device by going into your Settings app and choosing General, Usage which will show a list of all of the applications on your device and the amount of storage being used by each. Tapping on the Videos section will display a list of your TV Shows, Movies, and Music Videos, sorted by the amount of space taken up by each, largest to smallest. You can also tap on an individual TV Show to see all of the episodes for that show that are stored on your device.

You can also delete individual episodes or an entire show from these screens either by tapping the “Edit” button in the top-right corner or simply swiping-to-delete. Individual episodes can also be deleted in this manner from within the Videos app. Note however that depending on how your sync settings are configured in iTunes, deleted items may be transferred back onto your device the next time you sync.