What Are Those 'IPTV Sticks' Advertised On Twitter, And Are They Legal?

X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has gone through many changes since it was acquired by Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk in late 2022. One of his first moves was to lay off substantial numbers of staff, which helped lead to reduced moderation of bad behavior by users. 

Musk's X doesn't just have lax moderation. His team has also reinstated accounts for previously-suspended Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists. X has also officially allowed adult content to flood its service. Some major sponsors have responded by fleeing the platform, leaving space for ads from less scrupulous companies.

Besides videos of Japanese mascot Chiitan, some of the most common ads seen on X these days feature all sorts of "IPTV" sticks that can be plugged into your TV's HDMI port while promising thousands of free channels. Exactly how do those work, though? What is IPTV in the first place? Is the programming on them legitimate, bootlegged, or somewhere in between? And if it's bootlegged, can you get in trouble for buying these HDMI "IPTV" sticks? Read on to learn more.

[Featured image by nokia_fan via Flickr | Cropped | CC BY-NC 2.0]

For starters, we need to get into how there's both the broader meaning of "IPTV" and what it's come to mean online. IPTV is short for Internet Protocol Television, and it typically refers to any kind of television content streamed over the internet. This applies to streams that you can access through web browsers, standardized media players like VLC, and app-based streaming services. It can also include cable TV-like services using specialized hardware, such as AT&T's now-defunct U-Verse TV service. As long as it's transmitted over internet protocols, it's considered IPTV. (If you did use U-Verse, this is why AT&T didn't support CableCARD for use with third-party DVRs, but Verizon Fios does; Fios uses cable TV standards, not IPTV.)

In practice, when you see "IPTV" discussed online, it's generally referring to live streams that are available unencrypted to anyone on the internet. Sometimes, that includes bootleg services that are re-streaming commercially available TV networks or movies. These bootleg services are rarely legal, though sometimes they do point you toward legal services. FoxSports.com, for example, doesn't even have "Copy Video Address" disabled on its web streams. But we're not here to talk about that, are we?

Ads promising thousands of channels generally use paid TV network logos to claim they include channels you'd normally need a cable, satellite, or cable replacement subscription for. They often also advertise access to international channels that are typically hard to access even by legal means. 

Yes, repositories of legitimately freely available channels like IPTV-org exist with tens of thousands of channels, but they typically are more like local-access TV, and not premium services.

In the IPTV community, bootleg streamers are typically referred to as "unverified" IPTV services, a tactful way of saying they don't have legal permission to stream what they're streaming. ("Verified" services, then, would include the likes of YouTube TV, Sling, Fubo, etc.) Unverified services are also unreliable. Copyright holders, naturally, are constantly trying to crack down on them, so their streams often stop working without warning.

In 2023, for example, the Philadelphia-based YouTuber who went by "Omi in a Hellcat" pleaded guilty to charges including felony copyright infringement, surrendering the millions he made from his "unverified" Gears TV streaming service. Others have been busted throughout Europe and across the world. 

Law enforcement and copyright holders so far appear to go after distributors, because the law is more clear-cut, and those prosecutions tend to have a bigger impact. But you never know: UK police visited 1,000 customers of a vendor of jailbroken Fire TV Sticks in 2023 to issue stern warnings.