Who can actually watch your Live TV

An antenna plus a network tuner is one of the genuinely great home media setups. Free over-the-air channels, a real DVR, no monthly bill, and it shows up right inside the same app as everything else. Then you try to let someone else watch, and it quietly doesn't work.

The reason is simple once you know it, and completely invisible until then.

Live TV is not a library

Everything else on your server is a library: a folder of files you point the app at, which you can share with whoever you like. Live TV isn't a folder. It's a live hardware stream off a tuner, and it's governed by a different permission system entirely.

Inviting someone to your libraries — the normal "share with a friend" flow — grants no Live TV access at all. They won't get a partial version or a locked tab. There's simply no guide and no live channels in their app, with no explanation offered.

The only supported route

Live TV access requires adding the person to your Home rather than sharing with them as a friend. A Home is meant for the people under your roof, and members can be added while keeping their own separate account and watch history.

Two things to know before you go that way:

• A person can only belong to one Home at a time. If your friend is already in someone else's Home — or wants their own someday — joining yours takes that away. This is the detail that usually decides it, and it catches people out.
• Home is a higher-trust relationship than a share. You can still limit which libraries each member sees, but the whole feature is shaped around a household, not a neighbor.

Recordings play by normal rules

Here's the part that solves the problem for most people: anything your DVR records is just a file in a library, and libraries share normally.

So a plain shared friend can absolutely watch a show you recorded off the antenna. They can't tune in live and they can't schedule recordings, but once the broadcast ends and the file lands on disk, it appears for them like any other episode. If someone mostly wants to watch a specific weekly show, recording it and sharing the library gets them there without restructuring your Home.

Four things that will bite you

1. Tick the right library. DVR recordings often land in their own separate library rather than your main TV one. It's a distinct entry in the share dialog and it's very easy to miss.
2. There's a delay after the broadcast ends. The recording has to finish writing and get processed. If you have automatic commercial detection enabled, add substantially more time — it's CPU-hungry and slow on modest hardware.
3. Retention settings can delete it first. This is the sneaky one. DVR series settings include "keep only the latest N episodes" and "delete after watched," and the delete-after-watched rule keys off your viewing. You watch Sunday night, it's gone, and your friend opens the app Tuesday to nothing. Check these before promising anyone anything.
4. Your tuner count is a hard ceiling. A two-tuner device means two simultaneous live streams for the entire household, full stop. Recording counts against it too. If two shows are recording, nobody can watch a third channel live.

Also worth checking: transcoding

Over-the-air broadcasts are large and often in an older codec. When someone watches remotely on a phone, the server has to convert on the fly, and that's a much heavier job than streaming a modern file. On a low-power box — a mini PC or a NAS — one remote viewer on a recorded broadcast can be more load than several viewers on ordinary files. Watch it the first time rather than assuming.

The short version

• Sharing libraries never includes Live TV. Home membership is the only way.
• Home membership is exclusive — it can cost your friend their own Home.
• DVR recordings share normally, and usually solve the actual problem.
• Check retention settings, or the recording may not survive until they watch it.
• Your tuner count caps everything, including recordings in progress.