It can, and this is a genuine and confirmed mechanism, not folklore passed around in forums. Player apps keep the full channel list active in memory while you browse, and once a list grows past roughly 18,000 visible entries, some apps start to destabilize, not just while loading the guide but during playback itself. This pattern has been raised independently in community discussions about player settings, which makes it a more credible cause than a guess. The fix is not switching to a different app, it is hiding unused channel groups and building a favorites list instead, which cuts down what the player actually has to hold active in memory at any given moment.

Line up the timing carefully before you assume anything else. If the app updated itself, or your device pushed a system update, in the same window that buffering started, that is the more likely cause than anything happening on your network at all. Post-update regressions are a distinct and recurring pattern across streaming apps generally, not a rare edge case you got unlucky with. Check the app's current version number against roughly when the problem began, using your app store's update history if it keeps one. If the two line up closely, look for a follow-up patch addressing the issue before you spend real time adjusting router or DNS settings that were probably never the actual cause of what you're seeing.

If your app buffers hardest during evening peak hours, or specifically during a major live event when a lot of people are likely watching at once, and then runs clean the rest of the day without issue, that pattern points toward provider-side demand rather than your app or your device being at fault. No setting inside the app fixes oversold capacity sitting further upstream, because the bottleneck exists before your connection ever comes into play. It is worth actually timing this for a few days in a row: note the same time each evening against a quiet mid-afternoon stretch, so you know with real evidence whether you're dealing with a local, fixable fault or a capacity limit that only switching to a more reliable provider actually solves for good.

Two changes help with most short, recurring stalls once you've ruled out the bigger causes above: setting the buffer as close to none as the app allows, and pointing your device at a public DNS resolver instead of whatever your ISP hands you by default. Neither of these fixes a source-side problem or a genuine provider-capacity shortfall, but both meaningfully reduce how often you see the short freezes tied to normal network jitter during playback. Make these two changes only after you've already ruled out the channel-list size and the update-timing causes covered earlier, not before, so you actually know what problem you're testing for and whether the change made any real difference at all.