There have been a number of YouTube TV users reporting issues with their DVR over the past week, including missing and lost recordings. For those that remember, YouTube TV had an unfortunately-timed outage last week, and it seems as though the current DVR problems are a direct result of that issue.
For the most part, YouTube TV is a pretty good and reliable live TV service and that’s likely why it has managed to attract as many subscribers as it has. However, it is far from perfect and it is not uncommon for the streaming service to run into issues and problems.
Following the outage last week, users started to report more general issues with their DVR. We’ve been following those reports all week and over the past 24 hours, a YouTube TV engineer has started to provide more context on the problem by repeatedly stating that the service continues to suffer from “some transient delays” when it comes to processing recordings, and that this is an effect of last week’s incident.
The good news here is that YouTube is aware of the problem and is seemingly working on a fix. In a longer reply to a question on Reddit, the same engineer stated the following:
“We are catching up on processing a large backlog of DVRs from last week and hope to be done soon but in the meantime you may have some transient issues with some DVRs being immediately available. You can always watch VOD in the interim until they catch up but we are not putting forced ads on DVR.”
YouTube TV Engineer / Reddit
The ‘forced ads’ part of the message is in relation to concerns that YouTube may be adding ads to recordings. According to the reply, that’s not happening and is simply another of the DVR-related issues that have surfaced recently.
As this is an ongoing issue, there’s not much affected subscribers can do until YouTube TV manages to iron out the problems. As suggested by the engineer, it might be best to rely more on the live TV service’s VOD system than its DVR in the meantime.
