XBMC reconnect to stream?

Hi, I'm new to XBMC. I've scoured the corners of the internet and haven't been able to solve my problem, perhaps I'm using the wrong keyword, so I figured I'd ask the experts.
I'm trying to watch live tv stream from a subscription service, which works fine up until I reach around 30 mins, that's when I guess the connection to the server is interrupted for whatever reason, and I end up on the main screen.
I've tried adding the following to advancedsettings xml, but it doesn't seem to be working.

<advancedsettings>
<network>
<curlclienttimeout>300</curlclienttimeout> <!-- Timeout in seconds for libcurl (http/ftp) connections -->
</network>
</advancedsettings>

Any ideas on how I can extend the connection from timing out immediately?
If its not possible to extend/disable timing out, is there any way of reconnecting the last chosen stream.
It is a pain trying to watch, and sometimes get disconnected within a few minutes of connecting.
If I could at least have some handsfree way of reconnecting automatically, that'd be great.
All I gathered from the debug log was libcurl timeouts, which is why I figured the above setting would help, but it doesn't work.

Any ideas?