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Comment by nvme0n1p1

4 hours ago

OTOH - TV, radio, and YouTube are all unlimited and free. Why not streaming?

There are lots of people alive who grew up during the days of broadcast TV and radio. I get why they might not understand the difference.

There are a ton of legitimately free IPTV streams. You can watch them through most media players like VLC without having to download anything shady.

https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv

  • Ok but have fun explaining that to the average person. Buying a dongle is easier than installing software or typing URLs into their TV ("my TV doesn't even have a keyboard").

    To most people IPTV is a bunch of gibberish letters, indistinguishable from the gibberish brands on Amazon. Someone's grandma from Colorado doesn't deserve to get scammed because she didn't research the acronyms.

  • Two things:

    - How are these "legitimately free"? For example AMC is a commercial TV channel and as far as I know, they don't offer free streaming. Same goes for MGM, FilmBox etc.

    - Strictly speaking this isn't IPTV, it's just web streams. IPTV is usually delivered via multicast (MPEG-TS/RTP/RTSP streams, over UDP mostly).

Most people who buy these want to watch free movies, sports streams, etc that aren't on OTA or free services