While I don't have a direct answer for your issue, I can say that the DirecTV iOS app is reasonably buggy (as opposed to being solid, or as opposed to being overly buggy to the point of crashing on every other/2/3 uses).
What's going on? While streaming a particular Live TV station starting with LTE, when subsequently transferring service to wifi, from time to time (probably once every two or three uses) the app will essentially lose the signal and throw an alert stating that the Internet connection was lost.
To be perfectly fair (and as I'm getting into iOS development myself), this may not solely be a DirecTV issue. The iOS platform uses numerous frameworks (basically separate libraries of commands for specific uses, such as networking), so if the code that DirecTV is using doesn't handle network rollover very well, then that could also be an Apple issue.
For you, what I'd recommend is to QA the situation (it's too bad that sometimes customers are the guinea pigs for such things). As you say, make sure that your app is the only one actively accessing channels. Completely powercycle (turn off/on) your iOS device. Purposefully walk yourself through the steps to get to that particular error condition; literally, every button touch, every swipe/direction, etc. If you can reliably reproduce the process on one channel, then go to a channel that doesn't have the issue and repeat. Then, go to a secondary/tertiary channel that does have the issue and repeat. In taking good notes, you can then approach DirecTV tech support and relay to them. Presumably they can take reproducible issues and pass them on to the app developers, but that might be assuming too much. At least you can prove there's an issue for anyone willing to listen.
