What an Electronic Program Guide Can and Cannot Do in an Android TV App

What the guide is made of

Two separate data sets meet in the guide. The playlist supplies channel entries, each with an identifier and a display name. The provider's schedule feed supplies programmes, each with a title, a start time, an end time and the identifier of the channel it belongs to. The app joins them on that identifier. Nothing in the join uses the channel name, which is why renaming a channel leaves its schedule intact while replacing its identifier removes the schedule entirely.

Where guide data comes from and how it fails

Why some channels have no programme information at all

• A live event channel may publish nothing outside its event windows, because there is nothing scheduled to describe.
• Continuous channels with unlisted output, such as music channels, frequently carry no titles at all.
• A new channel can appear in a playlist before any schedule feed describes it.
• A channel whose identifier changed upstream loses its guide until the playlist is refreshed.

The four steps that fix a guide that is wrong

1. 1.Decide whether the whole guide moved or one channel

   A uniform shift is a time-zone problem and a single wrong channel is an identifier problem. They have nothing in common beyond the symptom.

2. 2.Check the device clock and time zone

   Set the time zone manually if automatic detection has picked the wrong region, then reload the playlist so the guide is rebuilt against the corrected offset.

3. 3.Refresh the playlist source

   A refresh re-reads channel identifiers and re-joins them to the current schedule feed, which repairs mismatched entries in one step.

4. 4.Confirm against an official fixture time

   If the guide and the published event time agree, the data is right and the broadcast itself changed after the feed was written.

What the guide never tells you