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Comment by jackb4040 | Hacker News Reader

Oh no, that's terrible! Please send me an example of one of those devices so I know what not to buy.

You don't need a special (often compromised) device, and usually there is a service you will have to pay for as well.

Search up IPTV on any social media and you'll start getting loads of ads for these services, for like $25 a month for a trillion channels, a catalog of VOD content, etc. You can use a simple client like Chillio on Apple TV as the client and have a safe stack.

I subscribed to one. And just to be clear, I subscribe to and pay $ for every streaming service available in Canada, and a maxed out cable plan. My cable company (Cogeco) serves up some pixelized dogshit low bitrate/obsolete codec feed for both NFL football and F1 racing. Via some dodgy IPTV provider (there are a million names and resellers but they're all ostensibly the front for the same service) I get amazingly crisp, excellent visuals, better accessibility, etc. It's crazy. Technically and usably an infinitely better option, at a fraction of the price.

"Oh but you might fund organized crime!" -- yeah, when most media empires are oligarchs pushing their politics and kleptocracy on people, I have more faith in those organized criminals than I do garbage like the Ellison family.

> Via some dodgy IPTV provider (there are a million names and resellers but they're all ostensibly the front for the same service) I get amazingly crisp, excellent visuals, better accessibility, etc. It's crazy. Technically and usably an infinitely better option, at a fraction of the price.

Your dogshit provider must be better than the one I was using. Live sports was usually good, but sometimes very flaky. Video on demand files were served with uniform rate limiting that was too low to handle scenes with people on horseback riding through confetti parades. Also, no bandwidth adaptation (which wasn't a real issue for me, but is needed for many users). Captioning was very weird... IIRC I would have to either have no captions or all captions, there was no option for captions only for non-english you're supposed to read to follow the plot.

I went through a few IPTV providers, but the channel list and services seemed identical across them, and I am pretty certain they are largely just fronts on the same network/backend.

But the quality across many channels were extraordinary (for some reason primarily the European channels were top tier - Sky, BBC, France channels, etc), and far above anything my cable co offered. Skysports F1 was 4K and just perfection, and just obliterated the trash TSN feed of F1. NFL games were spotless, where they are an overcompressed pixelated mess on my cable cos high cost feed, which I am paying approximately 8x as much for.

There was a lot of junk as well. Like a lot of the VOD content was a mess (a lot of it would "compress" the content by dumping frames, which is just crazy. A 12FPS movie is just ridiculous).

I guess mileage varies.

As one aside, I notice that Chillio that I mentioned before actually got removed from the app store, apparently because they use a plug-in system that Apple forbids. So that recommendation might not hold. It was far and away the best IPTV client in my experience, and hopefully that gets sorted.

I mean, you really don't. They are mostly infected with malware, it will probably try compromise as many devices on your network as it can to make them part of a botnet and try to access as many files as it can.

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/home-inter...

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