Catch-up TV for your channel, so the broadcast keeps earning after it airs.

Appointment viewing has been optional for years, and a channel that only exists at air time forfeits everyone who was working, commuting, or asleep. For international and diaspora channels the problem is structural rather than occasional: prime time at home lands in the early morning for viewers three continents away. The show they care about aired, in their night, and the channel that offers no way back simply hands that viewing to someone else.

Broadcasters have always known this. Satellite answered it with the +1 channel, the same feed delayed an hour on a second frequency, at the cost of a second carriage bill. Some streaming operations answer it worse: recent hours served as raw MP4 files, whole gigabytes per programme, with no quality ladder and seeking that fights the viewer. The need is real in both cases. The machinery is what fails.

On this platform catch-up is not a second system. It is the schedule, the library and the on-demand service you already run, pointed at the viewer who arrived late.

The +1 channel

On satellite, serving the viewer who sat down late meant broadcasting the whole channel again, one hour behind, on a second frequency, and paying carriage for both. It solved one hour of lateness and nothing else. A streaming channel gets the same effect from a repeat block in the grid, and the satellite-to-streaming migration is where those numbers usually get worked out for the first time.

The giant MP4

The other shortcut is serving recent programmes as raw MP4 recordings. It works in a demo and fails in the field: a single hour of broadcast video is gigabytes of file, delivered at one fixed quality, with no adaptive ladder for the phone on mobile data and painful seeking inside a progressive download. At roughly 1.35 GB per viewer-hour of standard HD, it is also the most expensive possible shape on any metered delivery contract, billed whether or not the viewer finishes the file. A replay here is an adaptive stream like everything else, and delivery is flat either way.

Catch-up is a licensing term before it is a feature. Content you produce is clean: repeat it and publish it on demand as you please. Licensed content usually is not: agreements commonly grant a defined number of repeat airings and a catch-up window measured in days, and the window belongs in the contract before the programme belongs in the library. The platform side is straightforward, since on-demand publication is per title and repeats are per schedule row, so honouring a 7-day window is a matter of doing what the agreement says rather than building anything. What it cannot do is turn a licence you did not buy into one you did, so ask for catch-up rights when the price of asking is lowest: at acquisition.