Catalog Quality Control Before Launch: A Practical Checklist

By the Channelwall team · Published October 25, 2026 · 5 min read

Viewers judge a streaming service by its catalog in the first thirty seconds. So do app store reviewers. A home banner that shows a family documentary rated R, a film whose release year is twenty years in the future, a live channel with a blank tile, or a title called “Test” tells everyone the service is not ready — even if the technology behind it is excellent.

These problems are almost never engineering failures. They come from metadata entered in a hurry, test content left active, bulk imports that mapped a field wrongly, or a cleanup script that changed more than intended. This guide is the catalog quality control checklist we run at Channelwall before every launch and every app submission.

Why catalog QC needs its own step

Catalogs are edited by many hands: content managers, licensors’ delivery feeds, bulk import scripts, and developers seeding demo data. Each source has its own errors, and nobody sees the whole picture until the home screen is in front of a viewer.

Treat catalog QC as a release gate, like testing the apps. It has an owner, a checklist, and a sign-off. It runs against the production catalog — exactly what viewers will see — and it is repeated before each app submission, because catalog changes between submissions are common.

Remove test and placeholder content

Every platform accumulates test titles during development: “Test movie”, “Demo channel 2”, sample streams, duplicate copies of a title created while debugging an import. They must not be visible at launch.

Search the catalog for names containing test, demo, sample, copy, dummy or similar words, in every language you use.
Look for duplicate titles — the same name, or the same name with different capitalization — and keep only the correct one.
Find titles with placeholder artwork, such as a single-color image or a generic logo, and either replace the art or deactivate the title.
Check live channels for demo streams. Sample streams used during development are often still attached to real channel names.

Deactivate rather than delete wherever possible. Deactivated content can be inspected and restored; deleted content cannot.

Check ratings, years, and credits

These are the fields reviewers and viewers notice, and the ones bulk imports most often get wrong.

Ratings: every title has a rating, the rating is correct for the title, and the highest rating in the active catalog matches the age rating declared in the app stores.
Years and release dates: no dates in the future for released titles, no default dates such as the same date on dozens of titles, and the year matches the release date.
Cast and crew: the people credited actually appear in the title. A cast list copied from another film is easy to miss and embarrassing to find.
Synopses: present, in the right language, free of formatting debris, and not copied from another service’s website.
Genres and languages: consistent spelling and capitalization so filters and rails work.

A useful trick is to sort by each field and look at the extremes: the oldest and newest years, the shortest and longest synopses, the titles with the most and fewest cast members. Errors cluster at the edges.

Check artwork in every size and shape

Apps use different image shapes in different places: horizontal tiles for rails, vertical posters, wide banners for the hero area, square images, logos, and thumbnails. A title can look perfect in one rail and broken in another because one image type is missing.

List the image types each app uses and the size each one requires.
Run a report of active titles missing any required image type.
Check that images are the right shape — a vertical poster stretched into a horizontal slot is worse than no image.
Check that images do not include other companies’ logos or badges, which suggest the art came from another service.
Check text legibility on banners: the title name and any overlay must remain readable on small phones and large TVs.

Check rails, banners, and editorial pages

Home screens are built from rails and banners that editors curate. They often bypass the filters that keep inactive or restricted titles out of search, so they need their own check.

Every rail has enough items to look intentional. A rail with one title looks like a mistake; hide rails below a sensible minimum.
Banner titles are active, playable, correctly rated, and have banner-sized artwork.
Rails do not repeat the same titles in the same order.
Rails respect profiles: kids profiles show only suitable titles, and restricted titles do not appear on the default home screen.
Every rail and page title is spelled correctly and makes sense to a first-time viewer.

Check live channels and the guide

Live channels have their own failure modes. Each channel needs a logo, a working stream, and current schedule data. A channel tile without an image is very visible in a TV guide, and a channel that plays a demo stream instead of its real feed is worse than a missing channel.

Check that the guide has data for at least the next several days for every active channel, that times are correct in the viewer’s time zone, and that channels without a feed are deactivated or show a clear off-air slate.

Check playback and availability

Finally, confirm that what is visible can actually be watched by the people who can see it.

Play every banner title and the first titles of every home rail, on at least one mobile and one TV device.
For a sample of titles, check that captions and alternative audio tracks listed in the metadata actually exist.
Check availability windows: no active title outside its licence dates, and no title that will expire within days of launch.
Check territory rules: titles are hidden or blocked in countries where they are not licensed, using a test from those countries or a reliable location simulation.
Check entitlements: subscription titles ask for a subscription, free titles play without one, and rentals unlock after purchase.

Automate what you can, review the rest

Most of these checks can be expressed as database queries or API checks and run automatically: titles with missing images, future dates, ratings above the declared age rating, rails with too few items, channels without logos, streams that return errors. Run them nightly and send the results to the content team, so problems are fixed as they appear rather than discovered on launch day.

Some checks still need human eyes — whether a cast list is right, whether artwork looks good, whether a rail makes editorial sense. Schedule a walkthrough of the home screen on real devices before each submission, with the content lead and someone who has never seen the app.

And be careful with automated fixes. A cleanup script that deactivates “suspicious” titles or replaces artwork in bulk can do more damage in a minute than manual errors do in a month. Keep scripts scoped to specific titles, take a backup before running them, and review the results the same way you review the catalog.

Planning a streaming launch or fixing one that is stuck in review? Channelwall builds and runs OTT services on LINQTV and can walk through your catalog, apps, and store submissions with you.

Talk to Channelwall