Catch-up and timeshift, explained properly
Catch-up and timeshift are the two features people most often think the app provides — and then blame the app when they're missing. Both actually live with your provider. Here's how they work, and why some channels have them and others don't.
Catch-up: replaying what you missed
Catch-up means your provider keeps a rolling archive of recent broadcasts — typically the last one to seven days — on their servers. Open the guide, pick a programme that's already aired, and it plays back from their archive. In most players a little clock icon marks the channels that have it.
The key point: the archive lives at the provider's end. If your subscription includes catch-up, it appears in any decent player. If it doesn't, no app can add it — there's nothing stored to play back.
Timeshift: pausing and rewinding live TV
Timeshift is the live cousin: the provider's servers hold onto the last stretch of the live stream (a couple of hours, sometimes more), which is what lets you pause a live channel or skip back to the start of a programme. Same rule as catch-up — it's a provider feature, surfaced by the player.
Worth knowing: live internet streams already run seconds to a minute behind the "real" broadcast, because streams are delivered in chunks and buffered. That's normal, and separate from timeshift.
Why only some channels have it
- Storage costs the provider money, so they pick which channels to archive — usually the popular ones.
- Some providers offer no catch-up at all; others offer a day on some channels and a week on others.
- If the clock icon is missing on a channel, that channel isn't archived. It's not a fault.
When catch-up plays the wrong programme
A classic gotcha: you pick Monday's 9pm programme and get the 8pm one. That's almost always a timezone or clock mismatch between the guide and the archive. Check your device's time and timezone first; many players also have a per-playlist EPG offset setting to nudge the guide by an hour. (More on how guides work: what is an EPG?)
Catch-up vs recording
Recording stores a copy yourself; catch-up replays the provider's copy. Catch-up needs no storage and no planning ahead — but it only covers what your provider archives, for as long as they keep it. seefax takes the catch-up approach: it plays what your provider makes available and remembers where you got to, rather than recording. And as always, seefax is a player — whether you have catch-up is down to your own provider.