I have run into something odd with ABC Iview that I don’t quite understand. For the past three nights, I have been following the stargazing programmes on the main ABC channel. After the programmes ended the broadcast would switch to the Comedy Channel for an additional half-hour. If I clicked on the IPTV live stream that is shared by the Children’s channel and the Comedy channel, I would see a notice that the stream was temporarily unavailable.

I soon discovered that I could still play the stream by going to the iView add-on and looking for it there. But it would only play on my generic Chinese Android box. On my Nvidia Shield I would get the same message that the stream was unavailable, though it would play normally up until 8 pm Sydney time.

Tonight I was watching the news stream on the Shield when the same thing happened for the first time on that channel. At around 8.20 pm Sydney time the stream suddenly cut out with the same message about it being unavailable. I also got the same message on the add-on live stream feed and on both the Comedy channel feeds. When I checked this on the Chinese box, the Comedy channel worked normally from the add-on but not the news channel.

I’m not sure what is going on here and I am particularly puzzled by the different behaviour of the Shield and the generic box. Both are set up identically with Kodi. Also, whatever is happening is a change from the recent past. Is this issue likely to get worse? Why does the live stream work from the add-on but not (sometimes) from the PVR IPTV Simple Client URL? Can anyone shed some light on this?