Catch-up TV on Xbox: what works today and what does not
Catch-up shipped on the desktop first and the console page is still outstanding. Here is the accurate picture, because a wrong one costs you an evening of looking for a button.
The short version, so nobody spends an evening hunting: catch-up works in the Windows app today, and the Xbox page for it is still being built. If you are on a console looking for a way to open last night's match, it is not hidden, it is not behind a setting, and you have not missed a step.
That is less than the title promises. It is the accurate answer.
What the console already has
The schedule is there. Tune a channel in Live TV, open the schedule layer, and you get the programme grid for that channel, with the shoulder buttons stepping a day at a time. A watches, B closes.
That surface is exactly where a console catch-up entry belongs, because a catch-up programme is a schedule row with a different verb attached. What is missing is the verb, not the screen. When the page ships it will attach to that layer, so the navigation you learn now is the navigation you keep, and navigating with the Xbox controller is the map.
Recording is complete, and on a console it is the better answer anyway. Scheduling from the guide works, and the scheduler is more careful than it looks: a guide recording stops at the programme's EPG end with an automatic margin of 2 percent of the programme's duration, clamped to between 1 and 5 minutes. A 40 minute programme gets about a minute of padding at each end. A 3 hour film gets the full 5.
How far back catch-up can reach
This one surprises people on the desktop too, so it is worth settling before the console page lands.
Your provider advertises an archive window, commonly 2 to 7 days. That is a ceiling, not a promise. Catch-up entries are built from programme rows, and a programme your guide no longer holds has no row to build from. So the reachable depth is whichever is smaller: the provider's archive, or your guide retention.
A line advertising a 7 day archive, feeding a guide that carries 2 days, gives you 2 days of catch-up. Nothing is broken. The other 5 days exist on the provider and no schedule entry points at them.
What surprised me was where the default sits. Guide retention defaults to 8 days forward and only 1 day back, clamped at 14 and 7, and programmes outside that window are dropped while parsing rather than stored and pruned later. At the default, a 7 day archive reaches 1 day. The archive setting is not the thing to touch; the guide is. Setting up the TV guide on Xbox covers the two modes and the 15 URL ceiling.
What the client actually requests
Catch-up is not a URL your provider hands you per programme. The client builds it from the channel, the start time and the duration, and appends the same .ts suffix the live builder uses:
live http://line.example.com:8080/user/pass/12345.ts
catch-up http://line.example.com:8080/timeshift/user/pass/120/2026-08-30:21-00/12345.ts
That shape matters for one practical reason. Because the client constructs the URL rather than reading it from the guide, a portal that supports archives but lays its paths out differently returns nothing, and it looks like the programme is missing rather than like the address is wrong. What catch-up and timeshift are goes through the mechanism properly.
The three-level cascade that decides archive behaviour per source, then per channel, then not at all, is half built. URL materialisation ships. The settings surface for choosing between those levels does not.
What to do in the meantime
Two options, and they are different rather than two names for waiting.
Use the Windows app. Same account, same sources, same guide, and the archive is fully reachable there. If the machine is near the TV, connecting a laptop to a TV over HDMI makes it a living-room surface for the evening.
Or schedule recordings from the guide. A recording does not expire when the provider's window rolls over, and it is the better habit on any platform for anything you know about in advance.
What this article measured21 claims, each with the evidence behind it
| Claim | Evidence | Counted |
|---|---|---|
| Catch-up version 1 shipped on the desktop head on 2026-08-10. The Xbox page for it is named as remaining work, alongside resume positions and flag re-sync. | n = 1 | Aug 31, 2026 |
| How far back catch-up reaches is limited by guide retention, not by the provider's advertised archive window alone. A channel with a 7 day archive and 2 days of guide gives you 2 days of reachable programmes. | n = 1 | Aug 31, 2026 |
| The client builds its own catch-up URLs against the portal, appending a .ts suffix the same way the live builder does, rather than reading a per-programme URL out of the guide. | n = 1 | Aug 23, 2026 |
| The three-level timeshift cascade, source then channel then none, is partially built: URL materialisation ships and the settings surface for the cascade does not. | n = 1 | Aug 31, 2026 |
| The console does have a schedule surface inside Live TV, with a day-stepping control on the shoulder buttons. It is the surface a console catch-up page would attach to. | n = 1 | Aug 31, 2026 |
| Guide retention defaults to 8 days forward and 1 day back, clamped to 14 and 7, and programmes outside it are dropped while parsing rather than stored and pruned later. | n = 1 | Sep 1, 2026 |
| Recording copies the streams into a file without decoding or re-encoding, which is why it costs little processing and cannot improve on the broadcast. | n = 1 | Sep 1, 2026 |
| Recordings can go to local disk or an SMB network share, with a connection test for the network case; a cloud backend is not implemented. | n = 2 | Sep 1, 2026 |
| Recurring and series recording does not exist, so every recording is scheduled individually from the guide. | n = 1 | Sep 1, 2026 |
| Recordings are local client files and the server holds no recording data at all, a boundary that was tightened rather than deferred: server-side recording management was removed as a goal. | n = 1 | Aug 16, 2026 |
| Whether a live stream can be scrubbed at all is the conjunction of a seekable flag and a positive length, with the transport not an input, which is why rewinding live usually is not possible. | n = 1 | Aug 23, 2026 |
| The console does have a schedule surface inside Live TV with its own key handling and hint set, which is where a catch-up entry would attach. | n = 1 | Sep 1, 2026 |
| Seven console destinations render a placeholder screen, and every one of them is a management surface rather than a playback one. | n = 7 | Sep 1, 2026 |
| The console's roughly 1 GB budget is a live constraint rather than a theoretical one: a 12 minute desktop browse session peaked at 1,080 MB. | n = 3 | Aug 30, 2026 |
| Under console memory pressure the guide cache is among the first things trimmed, which directly reduces how far back catch-up could reach. | n = 1 | Sep 1, 2026 |
| A finished guide recording carries a frame extracted from the recording itself rather than the channel logo, and stops at the programme's guide end. | n = 1 | Aug 14, 2026 |
| Scheduling a recording from the guide is one of the few rows in our own tracking marked fully complete, which is why it is the honest recommendation while the console page is missing. | n = 1 | Sep 1, 2026 |
| The automatic recording margin is proportional rather than fixed: 2 percent of the programme's duration, clamped between 1 and 5 minutes at each end. | n = 1 | Aug 14, 2026 |
| A live capture cannot report progress as a percentage because the input has no duration, which is the same fact that makes live seeking impossible showing up elsewhere. | n = 1 | Aug 23, 2026 |
| Catch-up on the desktop arrived with its own catalogue schema version, which is why it is a shipped feature rather than a setting that could simply be switched on for the console. | n = 1 | Sep 1, 2026 |
| Scheduling a recording from the guide is complete, and guide recordings auto-stop at the programme's EPG end with a margin of 2 percent of the programme duration, clamped between 1 and 5 minutes. | n = 1 | Aug 31, 2026 |