Comment by nvme0n1p1
6 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.
6 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.
That is chock-full of pirated content.
Most of it seems to be first-party streams of content which is also available as unencrypted over-the-air broadcasts.
It is paid for via ads or subsidies, so there's no reason to block access to the stream, so they just don't bother, and make life easier for anyone building streaming devices wanting to integrate their channel.
Someone accessing the stream directly is not the originally intended use case, but it isn't any different from someone accessing it via their smart tv.
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