Overview
- Google has intentionally disabled Live Guide background playback and limited the program lookahead to 24 hours on older, low‑memory smart TVs and streaming sticks.
- The company’s guidance singles out devices with less than 512MB of RAM as likely to lose these features to avoid app crashes and improve performance.
- Many user reports point to older Roku units as especially affected, with viewers saying video stops when they open the Live Guide and the future schedule is heavily shortened.
- Google product experts have advised impacted subscribers to upgrade hardware to restore full YouTube TV features, and the company has communicated the change mainly through its community forums rather than a broad public notice.
- The move forces a tradeoff between stability and feature parity on legacy hardware, and could prompt device upgrades or wider compatibility changes as streaming services tighten support for low‑memory devices.