What is IPTV? Television down the same pipe as everything else.

How it actually works

A broadcaster puts out a signal. Traditionally that signal travelled to your house one of three ways: down a coaxial cable from a cable company, down from a satellite to a dish on your roof, or through the air to an antenna. Each route needed its own infrastructure, its own equipment and its own monthly bill.

IPTV takes the same signal and sends it over the internet instead. A server receives the feeds and streams them to you on request, in exactly the way a web page or a video call travels to you. Your device, whatever it is, runs a small player app that knows how to ask for a channel and display it.

That is genuinely all of it. The picture on screen is the same picture. The difference is that the pipe already runs into your house, which is why the service costs a fraction of what the cable company charges for the same thing.

What you need

Three things, and you probably have two of them already. An internet connection of about 25 Mbps, which is below the American average. A device: a Fire TV Stick, an Apple TV, an Android box, a Smart TV, a phone or a laptop. And a subscription, which is where we come in.

There is no dish to install, no engineer visit, no equipment to rent and nothing to send back when you stop. You install one app and type three fields into it.

Five words you will see, and what they mean

M3U

A playlist file. It is a plain list of channel names and the addresses they stream from. Give an M3U URL to a player and it knows what to show you. It is simple and it works everywhere, but it produces a flat list with no folders, which is unpleasant when there are twenty thousand entries.

Xtream Codes

A better way of handing over the same information. Instead of one long playlist, the player asks a server for the channel list, the categories and the on-demand library separately. This is why we tell you to pick "Xtream Codes" rather than "M3U" in every setup guide: it brings structure, and structure is what makes 20,633 channels usable.

Portal and MAC address

The older approach, used by MAG and similar set-top boxes. Rather than a login, the box identifies itself by its hardware MAC address and pulls everything from a portal URL. Nothing is wrong with it, it is just from an earlier generation.

Buffer

The few seconds of video your player holds in reserve so a momentary network hiccup does not become a freeze on screen. Raising it costs you a fraction of a second of delay and buys a lot of stability. For live sport it is the single most useful setting in any player.

Connection

One stream playing at one time. Our subscriptions are one connection each, which we say on every page because it is the thing people most often misunderstand. You can install the app on six devices. Only one of them can be playing.

Is it legal?

The honest answer is that it depends on what is being streamed and where you are. The technology itself is entirely legal: YouTube TV and fubo are IPTV too. The question is always about licensing, and we are a service provider rather than a rights holder. We do not originate, host or broadcast any content and we hold no affiliation with any network or league. Copyright rules differ by country and by state, and what you do with the service is your responsibility. The legality page goes through the distinction properly.

Anyone who tells you flatly that it is all fine, or that they hold rights they do not, is selling you something. Our terms set out the position plainly and we would rather you read them than take anyone's word for it.