Live television arrives as a continuous stream of short segments, each one built as the broadcast happens. There is no content sitting ahead of the current second for the player to jump to, so a forward-seek button on a live channel has nothing to skip to. That's how live delivery works, not a fault in your app or device. Video-on-demand and series content is different: those files are stored in full before you press play, so the player can jump anywhere inside them. If fast forward works on a movie but does nothing on the channel you started on, the channel was live, and that's expected.

1. 1Live TV: no forward seek by design
2. 2VOD and series: full file, seekable
3. 3Catch-up/replay: works like VOD, but only within its time window

Most apps deliver video-on-demand as segmented HLS, the same chunked format used for live TV. Seeking on that format can only land on a keyframe, a full reference frame the player can restart decoding from, rather than the exact second you dragged to. If keyframes sit several seconds apart in the source encode, your drag lands near the nearest one, and the gap can look like the control is broken when it's really just imprecise. This is a property of the stream format, not something the app got wrong. Using the app's fixed skip button, commonly 10 or 30 seconds, is more predictable than dragging the bar because it moves a known distance instead of estimating one.

Jumping ahead forces the player to fetch and buffer a block of segments it hasn't downloaded yet, starting from wherever you landed. On a slow or congested connection, that refill takes longer than the player's buffer holds, so playback freezes for a few seconds before it catches up. That looks like fast forward failed, but the seek itself worked; what you're watching is a normal buffering wait triggered by the jump. If the freeze clears on its own within roughly ten seconds, the control is working and the delay is the real cause. Some of that delay is capacity on the provider's side and no local setting removes it entirely.

Player apps decide whether to show seek controls based on how a title is tagged in the source list: live, movie, or series. A movie or catch-up entry that gets mistagged as live has its seek bar hidden by app design, since the app assumes live content can't be seeked. This shows up most after a content list refresh goes stale or an app update changes how it reads that tag. Reloading the app's content list, or updating to the current version, makes it re-pull the correct metadata. Opening the same title from its movies or series tab instead of wherever it first appeared often confirms this is the cause.

Catch-up, where a provider offers, stores a recent window of a channel's broadcast, often the last day or two, as a separate, seekable copy. Once you switch into catch-up for a program, you're watching stored content, so fast forward and rewind both work the same way they do on VOD. The limit is the window itself: once the archive period for that program closes, the entry and its seek control disappear together. That's the archive expiring on schedule, not fast forward breaking. Live TV and catch-up look similar in the app but behave differently the moment you try to seek.