U-verse TV keeps jumping to live TV

It could be that your DVR is starting to fail.  How old is it?  What is the model?

You can call in and ask for a replacement (swear it's not working) but you would lose all of your recordings.

The DVR receiver I have now is a replacement to an older receiver. The replacement happened in March 2020. The DVR model is VIP 2250.

They did a line test and they said it is working fine (of course except for the issue I am having). 

Have you tried rebooting the gateway first and then rebooting the DVR?  

Unplug the gateway and the DVR.  Wait 30 secs.  Plug in gateway first, wait for all lights to come on and then plug in the DVR.

Just to confirm:

This is happening on the receiver that is the actual DVR receiver, not an additional wired TV receiver that is not the DVR?  If so, sounds like your DVR may be failing as skeeterintexas suggested.  You can try the reboots as she suggests, and you could try a Disaster Recovery (but I don't hold out much hope that it'll fix this).  But I suspect you'll be replacing that DVR again.

The message you're getting is normally generated by a remote receiver when either (a) the DVR runs out of streams, or (b) the Receiver loses communication with the DVR.  For the DVR itself to generate that message makes little to no sense.

I occasionally have the same issue. In fact it has happened twice in the last 30 minutes. My laptop is wired ethernet out of the gateway and I lose internet at the same time so I think that definitely eliminates the WAP and/or DVR. I go to Menu/Options/Restart Receiver which sometimes takes 2-3 minutes. It works but is really irritating. 

The message indicates that your receiver and your DVR lost communication with each other.  This could be because your Gateway went off to retrain due to a line issue?  Do you have FTTP or VDSL2?

@tonyyprostinak 

None of that should be occurring.  I suppose I’d factory reset the gateway if I had those issues happening.  This way if you have to call back into Att support you can tell them you’ve taken that step.   

The DVR was defective. The issue was resolved by AT&T 12 months ago. The resolution was to replace the DVR.

Thank you everyone.

Thank you gr8sho! It's worth a shot.

Received a replacement 5268 gateway yesterday. Lost connection twice within 10 minutes. Lost connection twice this morning. The second time had to restart 4 times before it finally connected. Was in a loop for 4 minutes. Did get a "failure to get bootstrap address" once yesterday and once today. Any ideas.  

@tonyyprostinak , go to http://192.168.1.254/ , look for the Broadband tab and take a screenshot of the statistics tables (sync rate, Noise Margin, Attenuation, Error counts) and post it here.

That's [the screenshots] the information I'm looking for, though I'm not sure you've been booted long enough to get the full picture, and the resolution makes reading it a bit difficult.  Maybe get another capture after it's been running longer.

The DVR is always wired.  You are not allowed to install a DVR with a wireless connection.  It might be connected via Coax or Ethernet on a 5268AC, but it must be connected by one or the other.

The message appears at any time the client receiver you are watching TV on looses sync with the DVR.  It doesn't matter whether or not enough streams are actually in use, it just means it's lost its stream from the DVR and assumes the reason was what it says it is (c.f. 10 fallacies of network computing).

How, exactly, is your DVR connected to the 5268AC?  coax?  Ethernet?  switches?

Ethernet. I have spares. I just swapped it out although my ethernet tester says it's ok.