How Live Event Schedules and the EPG Fit Together (and Where Each One Fails)

Where schedule data comes from

A playlist carries two things: the channel list and a schedule feed. The feed describes programmes as a start time, an end time, a title and a channel identifier. Nothing in that structure knows about the sport, the competition or the teams involved; it only knows what the provider inserted. This is the single most useful fact about a drifting guide, because it tells you the app is displaying what it was given rather than failing to fetch something.

What each data source knows, and how it fails

Why the guide shows the wrong programme

• A time-zone offset applied at the wrong stage, which shifts every entry by the same amount and is the most common cause.
• A channel identifier that no longer matches the schedule feed, which usually affects one channel rather than all of them.
• Provider data that has not been refreshed, which shows a schedule that was correct yesterday.
• A live event that overran, which moves everything scheduled after it without the feed being updated.

The four checks that bring a drifting guide back

1. 1.Check whether the whole guide has shifted or one channel

   A uniform shift points at the time-zone setting, while a single wrong channel points at an identifier mismatch. The two have unrelated fixes.

2. 2.Confirm the device's date, time and time zone

   An incorrect device clock, or an automatic time zone set to the wrong region, shifts guide data without any data problem existing.

3. 3.Refresh the playlist

   Reloading the playlist pulls the current schedule feed and re-matches identifiers, which resolves most stale and mismatched entries at once.

4. 4.Compare the guide with the official fixture time

   If the official fixture time matches the guide, the listing is right and the broadcast itself is what changed.

What a schedule can never tell you