I'm confused about the wording used.
Troubleshooting warning
DNS
DVR is using cloud DNS from "Cloudflare, Inc." which could cause problems with TV Everywhere
Is the recommendation to setup up and maintain our own local DNS servers so they're not "cloud DNS"?
Or does it mean to use our ISP's DNS servers?
My ISP's DNS servers are also "cloud DNS" and caused issues/outages, so I use quad 1 and quad 8
We recommend that you use your ISPs DNS servers. The way that CDNs decide what POP to direct you to is based on the DNS lookups that your device does via the DNS servers specified. Unfortunately we have witnessed a number of times where the CDNs that are used by TVE networks will pick a POP that is across an over-saturated link instead of the POP that is local to the ISP of the client. (I've also seen this behavior from Netflix and others).
To clarify, are you mixing 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 and using both of them at the same time? This is really the worst case scenario for streaming and can cause your requests to jump from one POP to another as DNS caches timeout and new requests happen.
Mixing DNS providers can cause "Transcoder Reset" errors due to network propagation delays causing m3u8's to go back in time.
We've had a number of support requests recently that were related to slow requests and timeouts on TVE streams and m3u8's going back in time, so are starting to try to add to our troubleshooting list to highlight these potential issues.
No.
I have my router set to use
DNS1 1.1.1.1 CLOUDFLARE Primary
DNS2 8.8.8.8 GOOGLE Secondary
All devices on my network use the router to get a DHCP assigned IP address and options, so all devices use my router for gateway and DNS IP address
When I did use my ISP's DNS servers, I did it the same way in my router, using their two DNS server IP addresses, Primary and Secondary
That’s literally what @eric was asking and suggesting against, and I absolutely agree – terrible decision.
I would really urge you to rethink this setup and decide on your favorite DNS provider and stick with it. Both Cloudflare and Google provide you with a primary and secondary IP to use.
I know it may be counter-intuitive, but using DNS servers across providers will lead you to uneven performance and hard to diagnose issues. The CDNs that are trying to guess where you are will many times give you different results based on if you are resolving through Google vs Cloudflare (or any other provider) which will cause your requests to bounce between POPs, which will lead to strange timeouts and other such issues. Sometimes things will be fast, other times they'll be slow. You'll have no idea why, and no recourse to fix it.
I've done this in the past, I have the smokeping graphs to prove it's a bad idea.
So just to be clear to my old peanut brain, using my ISP DNS is the best option for the server, but if I insist on using a 3rd party DNS I should only use one and not select multiple DNS providers?
Is there any need to have this same setup in my ATV devices or can they use any DNS?
Correct.
Correct.
For your general streaming health, you're best off following this policy for all of your devices. Netflix and other providers will have the same struggle if you try to split your DNS across providers.
DNS is tricky stuff, don’t feel bad. I believe that’s why the devs are issuing this warning. If you make the DNS changes on your router, all the devices on your network should inherit those changes (unless you’ve gone in and manually changed DNS on each device).
While I disagree with the devs on using ISP DNS for privacy reasons, I completely understand their reasoning as far as troubleshooting is concerned. In my mind, if we’re willing to take ownership of changing DNS, the onus is then on us to troubleshoot when things inevitably go awry.
I appreciate the suggestion and am changing my router to use
DNS1 1.0.0.1 CLOUDFLARE Primary
DNS2 1.1.1.1 CLOUDFLARE Secondary
This may be of some assistance for troubleshooting.
And some fun reading along with some more test endpoints:
https://www.akamai.com/blog/developers/introducing-new-whoami-tool-dns-resolver-information
As the saying goes "It's always DNS".
I use my own DNS, via Adguard Home.
it is set to use Quad9 with ECS and DNSSEC Validation as upstream DNS.
Never had any issues with it and Channels.
I use Adguard Home as my DNS server for my network. It was set to get lookups from Cloudflare and I have experienced some long delays in TVE connections. So now I switched Adguard to use OpenDNS with ECS support turned on. Will keep it this way for a bit and see if there is any change to TVE. The Channels troubleshooting page is not showing any concerns with this setup. (so far) 
You might also want to test just using the ISP dns servers for your channels server only. But I agree with at least sticking with one for your router/lan. I use pfsense, it forwards most queries to cloudflare over TLS.
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