TiviMate Catch-up Setup Guide

What catch-up actually is in TiviMate

Catch-up means the provider keeps a rolling archive of a channel for a set number of days, usually seven. Your player does not store anything; it just requests the archived material from the provider's storage.

TiviMate displays these archives in the timeline, with a colored arc on the progress bar marking what you can replay. You scrub into it like a recording, pressing play at the exact moment you want to resume from.

Crucially, catch-up is per-channel and per-provider. The button only appears on channels the backend actually archives, which means a channel without a catch-up button is simply not being stored, regardless of what the provider's marketing says.

The two settings that make it appear

Open Settings, then Playlists, then your playlist, then Catch-up. Set Mode to Xtream and Days to match your plan, which is seven for most plans. These are the only two fields you need to touch.

Some setups also need the archive container option left at auto for the player to negotiate with the provider's storage format correctly. Leave it at defaults unless a provider explicitly tells you otherwise.

After changing either setting, restart the app or at least reload the playlist so the archive metadata re-reads. Old cached settings can make it look like nothing changed when everything actually did.

Catch-up versus timeshift

Catch-up is provider-side: the archive lives on the provider's storage and you replay the last several days through the portal. Timeshift is player-side: pause live TV and the player keeps buffering locally while you step away.

Both are genuinely useful and complementary. Timeshift helps you pause a live game for a bathroom break, while catch-up lets you watch an entire show you missed yesterday from the beginning.

TiviMate handles both, but they live in different places. Catch-up needs the playlist setting above; timeshift works out of the box on live channels with no configuration at all.

When archives exist but won't play

A black screen or spinner on an archive usually means the provider's storage is slow or the archive URLs are constructed incorrectly. This is a common failure on reseller panels that bolt on catch-up without proper backend support.

On the player side, try the alternate player in Settings, then Playback, and check whether hardware decoding is glitching on the archive's transport format.

If playback fails on every archived channel, it is nearly always the provider's backend rather than your device. That is a legitimate reason to switch providers, because catch-up that looks present but never plays is worse than catch-up that is honestly absent.

What a properly working archive feels like

Rewind a live match, let it buffer for a moment, and you are inside the archive with working fast-forward and a timeline that reflects true program boundaries.

Accurate program boundaries matter because they mean the start of the broadcast is the start of the show, not six minutes of dead air or counting music. This is a quality signal that separates serious providers from everyone else.

That precision is a pipeline question for the provider, and it is the difference between catch-up as a gimmick and catch-up as an actual tool you rely on daily.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

Catch-up is the most underrated feature in IPTV, and in TiviMate it is a two-setting change. The provider side is where quality lives though, because archives you can scrub with true program boundaries are the ones worth using. Try it on a channel you genuinely missed yesterday, and if you want seven days of reliable catch-up, message us on WhatsApp at +1 (555) 364-8853 for a trial.