XMLTV / worked schedule interpretation · Primary-source explanation; no UK IPTV implementation or account test. Instructions are based on publisher guidance; a UK IPTV account was not tested on this platform.
Identify what is duplicated
Two records can share a channel and timeslot while carrying different titles. That observation deserves investigation, but it is not automatically a duplicated programme. Preserve the original entries and their grouping attributes before running a cleanup that discards one. A text-only list may hide metadata that explains why both were supplied.
Read the documented clump mechanism
The XMLTV DTD describes a clump of items such as a combined news-and-weather slot and uses clumpidx to distinguish members. This mechanism is different from two unrelated programmes accidentally overlapping or the same record being imported twice. The surrounding consumer contract still matters, because not every application necessarily displays clumps in the same way.
Work through a combined-slot case
Imagine a source describes News and Weather under one scheduled slot, with separate clump positions. Deleting Weather solely because its time matches News can remove an intended component. On the other hand, a repeated News record without a distinct grouping role may be a different issue. Compare the full attributes, titles and source history instead of deduplicating by channel and clock time alone.
Verify the reader’s result
Inspect how the actual legitimate application presents the grouped items and report a small sanitized example if the result is misleading. Keep an untouched copy for comparison. A valid grouping mechanism is not a licence to ignore every overlap or count one slot as several independently available streams. This article explains a specific guide-data case and reports no UK IPTV importer test.