Over the last week or so I’ve had serious issues with tuning some YouTube TVE channels such as the Food network and HGTV. Sometimes, when I try to tune these channels I’ll get the first frame and then see the spinning wheel and it never loads. Other times, it will play for a few minutes and then drop out with “Connection lost”. Everything has been rock solid until recently. As a relatively new user to Channels, I’m really hoping that TVE isn’t a cat and mouse game with the channel providers. Is anyone else experiencing this?
Yes. I have Hulu and have the same stuff going on. It started a few weeks ago and Channels has been trying to keep up with fixing it. Now I just don't know if its Discovery screwing it up or Channels.
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Thanks for confirming this as I’ve spent hours today uninstalling and rebuilding my channels installation only to realize that it’s a TVE issue. I really hope this isn’t an ongoing cat and mouse type situation with Channels and TVE as I really want to be able to set it and forget it rather than having to babysit my DVR. Do you think that this has anything to do with the streaming provider or is it all coming from the same source?
TVE is all from the stations website. This is why it can work fine in the app but not on TVE.
In this case it would be discovery go website. But they have done something that Channels doesn't like. My understanding is they also changed something that broke the commercial detection too. Which is what I think Discovery is trying to do to make you watch the adds.
When I learned about TVE, it seemed too good to be true and now it’s starting to look like that may in fact be the case. I’m going into my second month with Channels and the first month was rock solid and commercial detection was near perfect. The Channels Dev’s are outstanding, but they can only do so much. That said however, I am hopeful that they can get a handle on this going forward…
As has been noted in several different threads, the Discovery networks have been transitioning their infrastructure to a different CDN that is causing issues. The problems are not isolated to you, but rather affect everyone who has access to those networks. It has been a rolling issue, and users have only started to experience the problem in waves. (Case in point, this morning my Food Network recording was fine but last night's HGTV could not stream; as of this evening all Discovery properties are unusable.)
This could certainly be a product of Warner Bros. Discovery's new directions and management, and that would not surprise me at all. As every media company is starting their own streaming/OTT service and reclaiming all of their licensed properties, expect this behavior to propagate to others. (This already started within the past few years with networks locking certain new shows to their streaming properties.)
Originally cord-cutting was supposed to free users from cable. But now the media companies have finally discovered how to make streaming even more restrictive and expensive than cable. Welcome again to "American capitalism", where the deepest pockets control what should be public utilities and infrastructure.
So just for clarification, is Channels using a work around to integrate TVE into Channels or is it officially supported for third party use? My concern is that if it is a work around, the issues will never end and lead to a poor and unreliable user experience…
I have only ran into a few issues in over a year of using TVE. This is probably the worst it has been for Discovery. Most of the time it is pretty solid. Yes a network could change something in their website login page that pulls the data and Channels Devs would have to fix it. Due to the issues as of late I had to use the Hulu App to watch Discovery channels. But I have always setup recording there incase my Channels DVR messed up which is rare, or if power/internet cuts out. But I can honestly say when I had TIVO and a cable card. I ran into these same issues from time to time there as well. So we are always at the mercy of technology. It's great when it works. It sucks when it doesn't.
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Well said… 
I don't believe channels DVR uses a "work around" to authenticate and access TVE. They use a headless version of Chrome to interface with the TVE websites. I am not sure how they extract video from the link and restream it. That may in fact be a work around.
Interesting, thanks for the explanation…
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