Channels Constant Pausing/Buffering Sporting Event

Channels Android TV
#1

I've been using Channels almost exclusively since I believe around February. I use the Android Client on my Nvidia Shield. At some point I had the spinning circle buffering issue but I hadn't seen that happen for months.

With today being the start of football season for my team, I'm watching the NBC Sunday Night Football broadcast on NBC. The spinning circle buffering issue came back with a vengeance. It was happening sporadically, but often... sometimes multiple times a minute. I finally couldn't take it anymore and switched over to Kodi. Guess what? It didn't happen one single time.

There is definitely an issue with the Channels Android client. Can the devs acknowledge once and for all that there is an issue and start looking into it? I don't want anybody to tell me it's my network, because if it were, Kodi would experience the problem and it absolutely did not.

Are sporting events like SNF implementing a higher bitrate Channels can't keep up with or something like that?

I guess from this point forward, I'm going to watch my sports on Kodi, but I really hate using multiple apps for my TV watching.

Since I'm recording this game, I will check the recording once it complete and see if the problem is also there.

#2

Can you submit diagnostics from the Android app when it happens next?

I have an idea about what's causing this and plan to look into a fix this week.

#3

Sure, will do. Since it only happened during football I'll try to watch some football content and see if it will happen again.

#4

I watched a lot of TV last night... including football highlights... after I posted this, and it did not occur once.

Since it had not been doing it before, but did it A LOT during the NBC SNF telecast so much so that it became unwatchable, I can only gather that it's something to do with the broadcast itself.

Maybe it's something unique to Verizon FIOS with that particular NBC broadcast?

I checked the recording and did not find any instances of the issue revealing itself there.

Maybe since I was recording the broadcast, that has something to do with it. I should have stopped the recording and checked to see if it continued. That would be one difference between Channels / Kodi.

However, I watch plenty of shows as they're being recorded and have not seen this happen so it can't be solely that.