The first question that pops up for anyone who plans to subscribe to IPTV could be “Is IPTV Legal?”. Before answering the question “is IPTV legal?”, let me explain why there is a craze for IPTV around the world. On average a US citizen spends about $150 on a cable subscription, that too for a limited number of channels. Upon the introduction of IPTV services, a user can get more than 4000+ channels for nearly $8-10/month.
Streaming TV Channels, movies and TV shows using third party Kodi addons are illegal. Your streaming activities can be monitored by your ISP and can end you up in trouble. So before installing a Kodi IPTV addon, you need to make sure if your internet connection is encrypted and secured. All you need is a VPN to secure your connection and stay anonymous from the radar of your ISP.
Adding to the channels, here comes the catch. IPTV service offers most of the latest movies and on-demand contents with reality shows. When compared to the cable, the IPTV is cost-efficient. IPTV is the backbone of the cord cutting industry. In addition to this, there are lots of streaming apps like Kodi, Mobdro, and few more which allows you to stream most of the content for free! Streaming the latest movies or streaming any kind of copyrighted content is illegal in most countries.
What is IPTV?
IPTV is nothing but Television over the logical Internet Protocol or the internet. It delivers famous television content using signal based IP. Also, the IPTV comes with various forms as follows.
Kinds of IPTV
- Video on demand
- Time-shifted IPTV
- Broadcasting
Is IPTV Legal?
Most of the IPTV users think by themself whether using an IPTV is legal or not? It is obviously legal when you use Youtube and Netflix. Also, IPTV is legal until a user follows the IPTV rules and copyright laws. When you don’t follow the rules of IPTV services, then it obvious that using IPTV is illegal.
Basically, there are two IPTV Services.
- Legal IPTV services which have proper media publishing rights for the channels. Directv Now, Sling TV, Youtube TV, Hulu are some of the examples of legal IPTV services. These services share a part of their revenue with the channels. So the subscription costs are a bit higher than the illegal IPTV. However, it’s much better when compared to a local cable subscription.
- Illegal IPTV services are the ones that stay anonymous and stream the channels without their permission. Area 51 is one such service that does illegal streaming. Streaming TV channels with apps like Kodi, Mobdro, Terrarium TV also counts as illegal streaming. In the general case, these illegal IPTV services charge very less amount, and sometimes it’s even free to stream the channels.
There are pros and cons to both legal and illegal IPTV streaming. If you choose legal IPTV services you will end up spending more money. On the other hand, if you choose illegal IPTV services, you could be tracked by your ISP and get caught by the authorities.
In the end, if you have decided to go for illegal streaming, then here are a few steps you should follow to protect yourself. Before that, let’s check out how you are being monitored by your ISP.
Forms of IPTV subscription services
In this section, we’ve provided the types of IPTV subscriptions to know it is legal or illegal.
Types of legal IPTV services
- Most of the legal IPTV streaming services like Netflix offers a free trial for an account for about 7-days.
- Video-on-demand IPTV service accounts like Hulu and other services can be used in this method.
- Also, they offer a time-shift account for the users.
- Most of the legal IPTV services fall under the Live IPTV accounts. This includes DStv now, Direct TV, and much more.
Types of illegal IPTV subscription
Without darkness, there is no shine in everything. Like a legal subscription, IPTV also has different forms of illegal subscriptions.
- IPTV’s illegal services can be fully loaded with the Kodi box or Android box. Once you have got those boxes, you can start watching the premium TV content by subscribing.
- IPTV services come with in-built decoders and can be used on the streaming devices.
- Another form through which illegal IPTV services can be stream content is Roku stick, smart TV, and Amazon stick.
Free illegal IPTV services
Here we’ve some free IPTV subscription services that can be used for illegal streaming.
- Some IPTV android applications like Sports TV and Mobdro are not available on the play store.
- The IPTV URL streams like VLC are illegal.
- IPTV streaming website.
How to identify illegal IPTV services
The exact things to find illegal IPTV services are not quite easy. But, we’ll give you an ultimate list to identify it.
- Streaming the source, not from the original content is most likely illegal.
- If there is no official structure in your IPTV service then consider it is illegal.
- Sometimes, illegal official content will not synchronize with the official provider.
- While streaming the illegal IPTV content, it may run a bit late with some lag and low picture quality.
How do ISPs know what I am streaming?
What if I say, you are being watched right now by your ISP. Your ISP knows every nooks and corner of your online activity. It is like sharing a screen with your ISP. And these data are used by government officials to keep track of their citizens. And in most cases, your ISP doesn’t provide the speed as promised. This is called “ISP throttling“
How can you escape from the radar of your ISP?
If you really want to escape from the surveillance of ISP or government, you need the help of a VPN like IPVanish. A VPN is a Virtual Private Network, which routes and encrypts all the incoming and outgoing data. All these trackings are done based on your IP address. By using a VPN, you can change your IP address to a different location. Using a VPN will also secure the connection by encrypting the data. Using a VPN is the most optimal way to escape from the ISP throttling and government surveillance.
By doing so, your online activity will be anonymous. You can change your IP to any other country and stream all the contents. It will be impossible to track you. For instance, if Streaming is prohibited in the UAE, A UAE resident can use a VPN to mask his IP with US IP address and stream the contents. Depending on the VPN service provider, the number of IPs, servers, and devices used will vary.
What VPN should I use?
We highly recommend IPVanish because it’s optimized for streaming and also got servers in several countries.
Is there any alternative or free service?
After completing this article, you will definitely search for something like this. So we made it ourselves. Yes! There are a few free services. And these are called Proxy servers and Free VPN. Proxy servers are similar to the VPN. These servers are hosted in a remote location. When you access these servers, they will submit the request on your behalf. By doing so you can fetch any content by indirectly masking the IP. More or less free VPN also does the same job. But Free VPN has lots of such IPs.
Here comes the catch, the main reason for using the VPN is to escape from the surveillance of the government and ISP. These free VPNs and Proxy servers are open to all. Since there is no encryption involved, these data can be easily accessed by the government. This avoids the purpose of using a VPN. Still, it’s your wish to use a free VPN.
Final Words
Streaming copyrighted content is illegal. If you are using an IPTV which doesn’t have any media publishing rights then it’s illegal. If the copyrights are shared between the service provider, it’s legal to stream those contents. If you have any queries or suggestions kindly leave a comment below.