Couchly privacy policy

Effective: 21 October 2026

Couchly is a video player for Samsung Smart TVs. It plays playlists that you add yourself (M3U, Xtream Codes, XMLTV guides). Couchly does not provide, sell or host any channels, films or programmes, and it has no sign-up, no advertising and no tracking: the only usage data it sends are the anonymous counts in the error reports (section 5), which you can turn off. If you buy Couchly, we keep the e-mail address you paid with (section 4).

This policy explains what stays on your TV, what passes through our servers and why.

Who we are. Couchly is published by CodeAPIness shpk, Albania. Contact: [email protected].

1. What stays on your TV

These are stored only in Couchly's storage on your TV and are never sent to us:

• your playlists: their addresses, Xtream user names and passwords, and the downloaded channel lists, guides, film and series catalogues;
• profiles, favourites, watch history, "Continue watching" positions, reminders, recent searches;
• parental-control PINs and locked categories;
• settings.

Your TV connects directly to the playlist and guide addresses you add, and to the logo and poster images they contain. Those services are run by whoever provides your playlist, not by us; their own privacy policies apply. We never see that traffic.

Uninstalling Couchly deletes all of this from the TV.

2. Adding a playlist from your phone (pairing)

When you add a playlist by scanning the QR code, your phone sends it to the TV through our relay at pair.couchlytv.com:

• The phone encrypts the playlist for your TV before sending it (X25519 and XSalsa20-Poly1305). The key that can open it exists only on your TV, so the relay cannot read the address, user name or password.
• The relay keeps the encrypted message only until your TV collects it (it is deleted at that moment), and the session itself for at most 10 minutes.
• Stored for the session: a random session id, a short pairing code, timestamps, public keys and the encrypted message.

3. Searching from your phone

When you search by scanning the QR code on the Search screen, what you type or say on the phone is encrypted for your TV in the same way and passed on by the relay. Only the latest encrypted query is kept; it is deleted when you leave Search on the TV, and the session ends after 10 minutes without use (30 minutes at most). Voice is turned into text by your phone's own keyboard or browser; Couchly receives no audio.

4. Free trial, purchases and licence

Trial. To run the 7-day trial and to activate a purchase on your TVs, Couchly creates a random identifier the first time it starts. It is not your TV's serial number or any hardware id. Our licence server receives only a one-way hash of that identifier and stores when it was first seen (the start of the trial), when it last checked its licence, and the TV's model name (for example "QE65Q60T"), so that you can tell your TVs apart in My TVs. Reinstalling Couchly creates a new identifier.

Buying. You buy Couchly on your phone, through PayPal (PayPal Pte. Ltd., Singapore). PayPal handles the payment itself, as a separate controller under its own privacy statement: we never see your card, bank account or PayPal password. To link the payment to your TV we send PayPal the hash above, the language of the page and the plan you chose. PayPal sends us back:

• the e-mail address of the PayPal account that paid;
• the subscription's id, its plan, the end of the paid period and its status (active, overdue, canceled or refunded).

With that, our licence server stores a purchase: a random id, an activation code, the plan and how many TVs it allows, the paid period and status, the e-mail address, and which TVs (hashes) hold a place in it. When you remove a TV in My TVs we note when, to apply the limit of 3 removals in 30 days.

E-mails. We use the e-mail address only to send you the activation code after a purchase and, when you ask with "Email me a link", a sign-in link for My TVs (valid 30 minutes, usable once; only a hash of it is stored). We send no newsletters or advertising. These e-mails are delivered by Brevo (Sendinblue SAS, France), which receives the address and the message and processes them only for us.

How long. A purchase, with its e-mail address and activation code, is deleted automatically 12 months after its paid period ends (after a refund, 12 months after the refund), so that you can still renew in that time. You can ask us to delete it earlier (section 10). Payment records held by PayPal follow PayPal's own rules.

5. Error reports (you can turn them off)

To fix problems, Couchly sends short technical error reports, such as "playback error: network timeout". Before anything leaves the TV, addresses (URLs), e-mail addresses, long tokens and long numbers are removed from the text. A report contains:

• the kind of error, the cleaned message and how often it happened;
• the Couchly version and the Tizen version;
• a random install identifier, separate from the licence identifier;
• counts that show whether a version works better or worse than the one before: how many times Couchly was started, how many videos started or failed, and how long live channels took to start, counted in time ranges (for example "between 1 and 1.5 seconds"), never with times of day or channel names.

Reports never contain playlist addresses, user names, passwords, channel names or searches. We keep them for 30 days. Turn them off in Settings › Advanced › Send error reports; reports not yet sent are then discarded. The same switch turns off the counts.

6. Feedback you send

Settings › About › Send feedback shows a code that opens a short form on your phone. What you send is: a rating from 1 to 5, a topic, your text and, only if you type it, an e-mail address so we can answer. The TV adds the Couchly and Tizen versions; nothing else comes from the TV or the phone. Addresses (URLs), e-mail addresses inside the text and long numbers are removed from the text before it is saved, so a pasted playlist link is not kept. We keep feedback for 90 days and use it only to improve Couchly and to answer you.

7. What our servers do not keep

• Our servers do not write IP addresses to their logs or databases. An address is held in memory for about a minute to stop abuse (rate limits), then forgotten.
• Server logs contain only the type of request, its result and its duration, never its content.
• Hosting: our servers are run by Hetzner Online GmbH in Finland (EU). Traffic to couchlytv.com and pair.couchlytv.com passes through Cloudflare, Inc. (a network and security service, certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework), which sees your IP address and the requests on their way but cannot read an encrypted playlist (section 2). Demo videos come straight from our server.

8. Why we may process this data (legal basis)

• Pairing and phone search: to provide the feature you started (performance of a contract).
• Licence, trial and purchases, including the e-mails about your purchase: to provide the service you use or bought (performance of a contract).
• Error reports: our legitimate interest in keeping the app working; you can object at any time by turning them off.
• Feedback: your consent, given by sending the form; ask us at any time to delete it.

We do not sell data, we share it with no one except the providers named in this policy: Hetzner and Cloudflare (to run our servers), Brevo (to send purchase e-mails) and PayPal (to take payments, section 4). We do not use it for advertising or profiling.

9. Children

Couchly is not directed at children. Kids profiles and PINs exist only on your TV.

10. Your rights

Depending on where you live (for example under the GDPR), you can ask to access, correct or delete data about you, object to processing, or complain to your data-protection authority. Apart from a purchase's e-mail address we only hold random identifiers, so we cannot link other data to you unless you show us the identifier; write to [email protected] and we will help. Deleting the app removes everything on the TV. A purchase (with its e-mail address) or a TV's licence record can be deleted on request; this ends the licence on the TVs concerned.

11. Changes

If this policy changes, we update the date above and, for important changes, tell you in the app before they apply.