What is IPTV? How internet television works, and how to tell legal services from illegal ones

IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television: live television delivered as data packets over an internet connection instead of over a cable, satellite or terrestrial signal. Your telecom provider’s TV box, YouTube TV, Sling, waipu.tv and Zattoo are all IPTV. The term has also become shorthand for cheap unlicensed subscriptions, which is where the confusion starts.

Technically a channel is encoded once (usually H.264 or H.265), cut into short segments and published through a manifest such as HLS or MPEG-DASH. The player downloads the segments a few seconds ahead of playback, which is why a stable 10 to 25 Mbps connection matters more than raw speed and why a small buffer can freeze during a congested evening. Telco services often use multicast inside their own network for lower latency.

The legal test is not the technology but the rights. A licensed service pays the broadcasters and leagues for the right to retransmit their channels; an unlicensed one captures those channels and resells them. Signs of the latter: thousands of channels from every country for a few euros, payment by crypto or gift card, no company address, and apps distributed outside the official stores.

This silo compares only licensed services, market by market, with current prices from the operators’ own pages, plus the free public-broadcaster apps and a plain-language summary of the law in each country.

Legal live TV & IPTV by country