Hello Friends

Apologies in advance if this is the wrong section to be posting this, but a search for 'iptv' brought back 0 results.

My aunt recently bought an IPTV box from eBay. With this box, all she needs is an average UK internet connection (no satellite dish or satellite receiver). If she has the internet connection (which she does), she gets around 500 channels (English, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, Hindi, Polish and a lot more). She paid around £120 for hers.

I was interested so I had a little play and looked around the menus of the box. It turns out this 'box thing' runs Android 4.2.2. The actual hardware feels so cheap, think Raspberry Pi material with a cheap plastic box as housing.

What I would like to understand is, how do all these 'boxes' get their live streams for these channels? Where does the stream come from?

Any education on this would be greatly appreciated

Thank You.

Put it this way, most countries only allow licensed operators to transmit shows from their own country, but if somebody outside UK was able to pick up uk tv by satellite say, then the UK government is basically powerless to stop that person distributing over internet.

In all probability, most iptv operators are probably of dubious legality, and the UK media complain etc.

However, for UK expats, they often have to resort to using such services (or use a VPN etc) to watch UK TV.

I am sure most expats would willingly pay for a truly legit service, but the media always bleats about contractual rights.

I pay a uk tv license, but when i am abroad I am not allowed to watch mainstream UK channels (main five UK companies over internet).

Technically, you should not be able to get Sky pay channels abroad,but they do little to stop it so long as they get their dosh.

Whenever a question of your type is asked, people warn you that you could be prosecuted blah blah blah.

In reality the only real risk you take using such services is they simply stop operating, and you lose your fee, and would have no way of getting fees back.

At the end of the day, you take a financial risk using an IPTV service, but I was abroad for several years and it was worth the money.

There are of course legit services, but they would normally only be allowed to provide a licensed service in their own country.

Tons of info online had U.S tv plus Sky foregin ,ie French German too many to mention my motorised dish hasn't moved in monHts

Thanks for the replies guys. I still don't know how the live stream is obtained though. Any ideas on that front?

I'm 95% confident that the box you saw is basically running XBMC (or Kodi as its now known) with some add ons that allow you to watch the live streams.

I recently bought one of these boxes (G Box Q); streams are mixture of flash streams (taken from websites but presented in on-screen menus generally) and P2P streams.

Many of the streams are of dubious legality and quality of them varies wildly. It's certainly not the smoothest experience but you can see an immense variety of global stations if you look in the right places.

If you could watch show live and then via IPTV, you would notice a lag of a few seconds. So one way is basically to take say a satellite feed, record, convert to internet format and transmit over internet, on the fly (think of UN translators listening, translating, and speaking all at same time). Needs pretty powerful PCs though.

Thanks guys. Any ideas on how one would go about creating their own IPTV service? All I have at the moment is a Raspberry Pi 2 running XMBC.

Over 4000 TV ( and over 3000 radio) channels listed here - http://www.lyngsat-stream.com/