The EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) is what shows the now/next information and full schedule on your IPTV player. When the TV guide is missing or blank, streaming becomes significantly less convenient — you lose programme names, show descriptions, and the ability to browse what is on. IPTV EPG not working is one of the most common complaints, and it is almost always fixable.
How IPTV EPG works (the short version)
Every channel in your IPTV playlist has a tvg-id attribute — a unique identifier that tells your player (and the middleware) which guide entry belongs to that channel. The guide data itself is an XMLTV file: an XML document listing channels and their programmes with start/end times. For a channel's guide to appear in your player, the tvg-id must match a channel id in the XMLTV data.
When that match is missing or wrong, the guide is blank for that channel. The channel still plays — the stream itself is unaffected — but the now/next information disappears.
Common reasons IPTV EPG stops working
- tvg-id mismatch — the channel ID in the playlist does not match any channel in the guide data. This is the most common cause.
- Guide data source offline — the XMLTV URL your middleware or player is fetching from is unreachable or no longer maintained.
- Playlist re-sync changed channel IDs — after a sync from your provider, the
tvg-idvalues may have changed, breaking previously working matches. - Player EPG URL not configured — the XMLTV URL was never entered in the player's settings, or it points to a default that your provider does not populate.
- Timezone offset — guide times appear but are shifted by several hours because the data source uses a different timezone than the player expects.
- Player cache stale — the player is displaying a cached guide from days ago and has not pulled fresh data.
Step-by-step: fix IPTV EPG not working
- Confirm the XMLTV URL is entered in your player. In your iptv.domains dashboard, copy the XMLTV URL shown for your account and paste it into your player's EPG or guide settings. Force a refresh.
- Run auto-match in the EPG editor. Open the EPG editor from your dashboard and use the Auto-match button. The system scans a shared pool of guide sources and assigns the best match for each channel based on name similarity and channel ID. For large playlists, this covers the majority of channels in one step.
- Fix individual channels manually. After auto-match, any channel still showing no guide data has a Fix Guide button on its row. Click it, search for the channel by name or ID, and select the correct guide entry from the results.
- Force-refresh the EPG in your player. After making changes, clear the player's EPG cache and trigger a fresh download of the XMLTV data. In TiViMate this is in Settings → EPG → Update Now.
- Check that your playlist is synced. If channels were recently added to your account, run a sync first so the EPG editor can see them. A channel that does not appear in the editor cannot be mapped.
Tom's TV guide goes blank after a provider sync — fixed in minutes
Tom's TV guide had been working for weeks. After his provider updated their channel list, the guide went blank on most channels. Checking the EPG editor showed that the sync had reset the tvg-id values for around 400 channels, breaking all the existing matches.
Tom clicked Auto-match. Within a couple of minutes the system had matched 370 of the 400 channels to sources in the shared guide pool. For the remaining 30, he used the Fix Guide button to search by channel name and assign the correct entries manually. He then forced an EPG refresh in TiViMate. Guide data came back for all channels within the next refresh cycle — nothing had to be reinstalled or reconfigured on the TV itself.
EPG shows wrong programme times
If guide data appears but the times are consistently wrong — say, everything is shifted by two hours — the cause is almost always a timezone mismatch. Check the timezone setting in your player first. Most players have a setting under EPG or general settings that lets you offset the displayed times. If the player's timezone is correct and the data is still off, the guide source itself may be publishing in a different timezone; in that case, the EPG editor's manual override lets you assign a different source for those channels that publishes in the correct offset.
When the EPG editor is the simplest answer
The EPG editor solves the tvg-id mismatch problem at the source rather than at the player level — which means the fix applies automatically across all your devices without changing any player settings. Once a channel is mapped in the editor, every device using your permanent IPTV URL will see guide data for that channel on the next refresh, whether it is a TV, phone, or tablet.
Related guides
For a full walkthrough of every EPG editor feature — including custom programme entries and source management — see the complete EPG editor guide. If you are new to EPG and want to understand how XMLTV data works, see what is EPG and XMLTV. And if your playlist is so large that finding channels to map is difficult, the playlist editor guide shows how to organise it into manageable groups first.