Watching what you missed
Catch-up is the difference between a guide you read and a guide you use. With it, last night's match is something you tap; without it, the listings for yesterday are a record of what you missed. Whether you have it is not up to the app — it is a decision your provider made, channel by channel, and this page is about finding out and using what you have.
What catch-up actually is
Your provider records its own channels and keeps a window of the recent past — usually somewhere between two and seven days. Catch-up is being allowed to play from inside that window. It is not a recording made on your device and it takes up none of your storage: the file lives on the provider's server, and you are streaming it exactly as you stream the live feed. Which is also why it disappears on schedule. A seven-day archive means Tuesday is gone next Tuesday, and no app can hold it open.
How to tell whether your subscription has it
Do not go looking in settings. The provider declares it and the app reads the declaration: open a channel's schedule in the guide and look at a programme that has already finished. If a replay control appears beside it, that channel has an archive and the app knows how far back it goes. If nothing appears, the provider did not offer it for that channel — and Tivsy deliberately shows nothing rather than a control that would fail. A guide full of taps that do not work is worse than a guide that never offered them.
Why some channels have it and others do not
Because the flag is per channel, not per subscription. Recording costs the provider storage and bandwidth for every hour of every channel, so most keep an archive for the few dozen channels people ask about and none for the several thousand they carry to look comprehensive. It is completely normal for a national broadcaster to have seven days and the channel next to it in the same list to have nothing at all.
Playing a finished programme
Open the guide, tap the channel to see its schedule, and scroll back. On a subscription with catch-up the list opens on what is on now and continues into the past as far as the archive goes; on one without, it starts at the present as it always did. Tap a finished programme and it plays from the start — a couple of minutes early, deliberately, because broadcast clocks and guide data disagree constantly and missing the opening is worse than seeing the end of the previous programme.
It keeps its own place
A recording you leave halfway through is remembered as itself, not as the channel. That matters more than it sounds: without it, watching forty minutes of last night's match would leave the live channel apparently forty minutes in, and the home screen would offer to carry on with a live broadcast from a point that no longer exists. Come back to a recording and it resumes where you were; the live channel is untouched.
Common questions
My provider says it has catch-up, but no channel shows it.
Then the panel is not declaring it in a way any player can read. Catch-up is announced by the provider in one of three ways — a flag on the channel, a day count, or an address template — and a subscription that has the feature but announces none of them looks identical to one that does not have it. There is nothing to configure at this end; the provider is the only one who can turn the declaration on.
Can I keep a catch-up programme on my device?
No, and deliberately. Films and episodes can be downloaded and watched offline; a recording cannot, because its address is built from a timestamp inside the provider's archive window. A file kept today would have a source that is gone next week, re-downloading it would be impossible, and nothing in the app could explain why. Offering it would be offering something that quietly stops working.
How far back can I go?
As far as your provider says, and the app takes that at its word rather than testing it. Most archives run two to seven days. Asking for the eighth day of a seven-day window is a request that fails slowly, so anything outside the declared window is simply not offered.
Does it work on Apple TV?
The archive belongs to your subscription, not to a device, so a channel with catch-up has it wherever you are signed in. What differs is only how you reach it: on the phone you tap a programme in the schedule, and on the television you open the same schedule from the guide.
Catch-up is the one IPTV feature with no agreed standard behind it — two families of provider software announce it in incompatible ways, and plenty of panels announce it not at all. Tivsy reads every form it can and shows the control only where it will genuinely work, which means an app that says less and is wrong less often.